amous Kingdoms of
Macaria, 1641, by Hartlib), the pursuit of science is not a feature.]
It is evident that the predominating interest that moved his imagination
was different from that which guided Plato. While Plato aimed at
securing a permanent solid order founded on immutable principles,
the design of Bacon was to enable his imaginary community to achieve
dominion over nature by progressive discoveries. The heads of Plato's
city are metaphysicians, who regulate the welfare of the people by
abstract doctrines established once for all; while the most important
feature in the New Atlantis is the college of scientific investigators,
who are always discovering new truths which may alter the conditions of
life. Here, though only in a restricted field, an idea of progressive
improvement, which is the note of the modern age, comes in to modify
the idea of a fixed order which exclusively prevailed in ancient
speculation.

On the other hand, we must not ignore the fact that Bacon's ideal
society is established by the same kind of agency as the ideal societies
of Plato and Aristotle. It has not developed; it was framed by the
wisdom of an original legislator Solamona. In this it resembles
the other imaginary commonwealths of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries. The organisation of More's Utopia is fixed initially once for
all by the lawgiver Utopus. The origin of Campanella's Civitas Solis is
not expressly stated, but there can be no doubt that he conceived its
institutions as created by the fiat of a single lawgiver. Harrington,
in his Oceana, argues with Machiavelli that a commonwealth, to be
well turned, must be the work of one man, like a book or a building.
[Footnote: Harrington, Oceana, pp. 77-8, 3rd ed. (1747).]

What measure of liberty Bacon would have granted to the people of his
perfect state we cannot say; his work breaks off before he comes
to describe their condition. But we receive the impression that the
government he conceived was strictly paternal, though perhaps less
rigorous than the theocratic despotism which Campanella, under Plato's
influence, set up in the City of the Sun. But even Campanella has this
in common with More--and we may be sure that Bacon's conception would
have agreed here--that there are no hard-and-fast lines between the
classes, and the welfare and happiness of all the inhabitants is
impartially considered, in contrast with Plato's scheme in the Laws,
where the artisans and manual l