note: Campanella held its
purpose to be the contemplation of the wisdom of God; cp., for instance,
De sensu rerum, Bk. iv. epilogus, where the world is described as statua
Dei altissimi (p. 370; ed. 1620).] The end of the sciences is their
usefulness to the human race. To increase knowledge is to extend
the dominion of man over nature, and so to increase his comfort and
happiness, so far as these depend on external circumstances. To Plato
or Seneca, or to a Christian dreaming of the City of God, this doctrine
would seem material and trivial; and its announcement was revolutionary:
for it implied that happiness on earth was an end to be pursued for its
own sake, and to be secured by co-operation for mankind at large. This
idea is an axiom which any general doctrine of Progress must presuppose;
and it forms Bacon's great contribution to the group of ideas which
rendered possible the subsequent rise of that doctrine.

Finally, we must remember that by Bacon, as by most of his Elizabethan
contemporaries, the doctrine of an active intervening Providence, the
Providence of Augustine, was taken as a matter of course, and governed
more or less their conceptions of the history of civilisation. But, I
think, we may say that Bacon, while he formally acknowledged it, did not
press it or emphasise it. [Footnote: See Advancement, iii. II. On
the influence of the doctrine on historical writing in England at the
beginning of the seventeenth century see Firth, Sir Walter Raleigh's
History of the World (Proc. of British Academy, vol. viii., 1919), p.
8.]

5.

Bacon illustrated his view of the social importance of science in his
sketch of an ideal state, the New Atlantis. He completed only a part of
the work, and the fragment was published after his death. [Footnote: In
1627. It was composed about 1623. It seems almost certain that he
was acquainted with the Christianopolis of Johann Valentin Andreae
(1586-1654), which had appeared in Latin in 1614, and contained a plan
for a scientific college to reform the civilised world. Andreae, who was
acquainted both with More and with Campanella, placed his ideal society
in an island which he called Caphar Salama (the name of a village in
Palestine). Andreae's work had also a direct influence on the Nova
Solyma of Samuel Gott (1648). See the Introduction of F. E. Held to his
edition of Christianopolis (1916). In Macaria, another imaginary state
of the seventeenth century (A description of the f