8. _Bacon's New Atalantis._--When philosophers had their attention turned to the boundless prospect of increase to the knowledge and powers and pleasures of man which the cultivation of experimental philosophy seemed to promise, it was natural that they should think of devising institutions and associations by which such benefits might be secured. Bacon had drawn a picture of a society organized with a view to such purpose, in his fiction of the "New Atalantis." The imaginary teacher who explains this institution to the inquiring traveller, describes it by the name of _Solomon's House_; and says[213], "The end of our foundation is the knowledge of causes and secret motions of things; and the enlarging the bounds of the human empire to effecting of things possible." And, as parts of this House, he describes caves and wells, chambers and towers, baths and gardens, parks and pools, dispensatories and furnaces, and many other contrivances, provided for the purpose of making experiments of many kinds. He describes also the various employments of the Fellows of this College, who take a share in its researches. There are _merchants of light_, who bring books and inventions from foreign countries; _depredators_, who gather the experiments which exist in books; _mystery-men_, who collect the experiments of the mechanical arts; _pioneers_ or _miners_, who invent new experiments; and _compilers_, "who draw the experiments of the former into titles and tables, to give the better light for the drawing of observations and axioms out of them." There are also _dowry-men_ or _benefactors_, that cast about how to draw out of the experiments of their fellows things of use and practice for man's life; _lamps_, that direct new experiments of a more penetrating light than the former; _inoculators_, that execute the experiments so directed. Finally, there are the _interpreters of nature_, that raise the former discoveries by experiments into greater observations (that is, more general truths), axioms and aphorisms. Upon this scheme we may remark, that fictitious as it undisguisedly is, it still serves to exhibit very clearly some of the main features of the author's philosophy:--namely, his steady view of the necessity of ascending from facts to the most general truths by several stages;--an exaggerated opinion of the aid that could be derived in such a task from technical separation of the phenomena and a distribution of them into tables;--a belief, probably incorrect, that the offices of experimenter and interpreter may be entirely separated, and pursued by different persons with a certainty of obtaining success!--and a strong determination to make knowledge constantly subservient to the uses of life.