Bacon On [Philosophic] Prophecy, and New Atlantis
New Atlantis appeared posthumously in 1626. In re-reading his Essays, Or Counsels Civil and Moral I suspected that Bacon (1561 – 1626) alerts us to the significance of the genre of New Atlantis. For in the 1625 edition of the Essays, Bacon included a short piece, “Of Prophecies” in it. This essay only deals with a subset of prophecies. It explicitly sets aside “divine prophecies, nor of heathen oracles, nor of natural predictions.” I suspect ‘natural predictions’ involve phenomena like the strange behavior of birds ahead of an earthquake, or the thunder ahead of a lightning (etc.). Rather, the essay focuses on recorded prophecies that have inexplicable causes.*
In what follows I take familiarity with New Atlantis for granted. My present interest is in the final paragraph of “Of Prophecies:”
There are numbers of the like kind, especially if you include dreams, and predictions of astrology; but I have set down these few only of certain credit, for example. My judgment is, that they ought all to be despised, and ought to serve but for winter talk by the fireside; though, when I say despised, I mean it as for belief; for otherwise, the spreading or publishing of them is in no sort to be despised, for they have done much mischief; and I see many severe laws made to suppress them. That that hath given them grace, and some credit, consisteth in three things. First, that men mark when they hit, and never mark when they miss; as they do, generally, also of dreams. The second is, that probable conjectures, or obscure traditions, many times turn themselves into prophecies; while the nature of man, which coveteth divination, thinks it no peril to foretell that which indeed they do but collect, as that of Seneca’s verse; for so much was then subject to demonstration, that the globe of the earth had great parts beyond the Atlantic, which might be probably conceived not to be all sea; and adding thereto the tradition in Plato’s Timæus, and his Atlanticus, it might encourage one to turn it to a prediction. The third and last (which is the great one), is, that almost all of them, being infinite in number, have been impostures, and, by idle and crafty brains, merely contrived and feigned, after the event past.—Bacon (1625) “Of Prophecies”
First, I infer Bacon thinks the government can legitimately prohibit public dissemination and discussion of purported prophies. These may be dangerous to public order, after all. (The history of prophetically sanctioned would-be-usurpers is long.)
Second, Bacon thinks most purported prophecies are shaped by confirmation bias (“men mark when they hit, and never mark when they miss”) and selection bias (“after the event past”). This bias itself is the effect of the design of some personal or political interest (“crafty brains”).
Third, for Bacon many of the most notable purported prophecies are themselves instances of a loose tradition turning into a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. As very regular readers know this is a topic of considerable interest to me (see here.) Let’s explore.
Bacon’s text is ambiguous between two approaches here: he could either be taken to describe a kind of impersonal social process in which popular, circulating stories and narratives end up being treated as prophecies and significant myths by subsequent generations who don’t know of the circumstances or even meaning of the origin of these stories. But the prophecies do play an important social role today. (This is the realm of classical social anthropology, and some of Freud’s most memorable essays.)
Or he could be taken to imply that someone actively engineers (“to turn”) the uptake of a particular pre-existing set of stories or images for a particular social end, and in which these stories end up functioning as a kind of regulative prediction. (The latter just is what I have called ‘philosophic prophecy.’) The two approaches are not mutually exclusionary!
Now, one reason to think Bacon is also thinking of the second kind of activity is because the example he gives just describes the conceit of New Atlantis (drafted around the same time) a bit too neatly. That is, New Atlantis also draws on existing obscure traditions — including some related to the origin of the Biblical cannon — and draws on the Timaeus’ views speculations about lost continents and that are not knowably false at the time. The Pacific could include many islands. New Atlantis itself could be read as providing a non-trivial number of possible ‘predictions’ about what one might find on such an island and, more important, what institutions one might oneself wish to found subsequently (as demonstrated by the Royal Society later).
In his preface to the reader, Bacon’s assistant, W. Rawley, suggested that New Atlantis is “A Work Unfinished.” In the preface, Rawley implies that Bacon would have added “a frame of Laws, or of the best state or mould of a commonwealth.” And, indeed, New Atlantis is underspecified in those respects. As a political theorist I would love to read that manuscript!:)
But let me offer another thought. I suspect New Atlantis is the full text Bacon intended. The work, however, is not just the text itself; rather it is also a prediction, whose intended effect is not accuracy in the present, but certain Works that shape and perfect the future.+
*It’s not wholly obvious what delimits the category of interest, and as we will see he rules out a number of these as not worth taking seriously.
+Rawley added a sentence to the end of the manuscript, where he claims, “the rest was not perfected.”