An Oath of Concealment
After cataloguing the House's laboratories and staff, the Father mentions almost in passing that the fellows hold formal consultations to decide which inventions to publish and which to suppress, binding themselves by oath to secrecy over the latter. Even the state of Bensalem, we learn, is not always told.
we have consultations, which of the inventions and experiences which we have discovered shall be published, and which not: and take all an oath of secrecy, for the concealing of those which we think fit to keep secret
Knowledge as a Managed Resource
The logic is not obscurantism for its own sake — Bacon's fellows publish freely elsewhere, touring cities to announce useful discoveries and give warning of natural disasters. But some knowledge, in this vision, is treated as too dangerous or too valuable to circulate without control. It is one of the earliest fictional statements of a problem that would only grow sharper as science matured: who decides what a research institution owes the public, and what it may withhold.
Drawn from Chapter IV of New Atlantis, near the close of the Father's account of Salomon's House.
Related Concepts
