Left unfinished at Bacon's death and published by his chaplain the year after, New Atlantis imagines a ship of European sailors blown off course onto the hidden island of Bensalem — a Christian utopia governed not by philosopher-kings but by natural philosophers. At its centre stands Salomon's House, a research institution devoted to 'the knowledge of causes, and secret motions of things,' whose catalogue of laboratories, experiments, and specialised researchers reads as a blueprint for organised science more than two centuries before the professional scientific institution existed.
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