Quoting from James Spedding Preface to the "New Atlantis":
"...the vision not of an ideal world released from the natural conditions to which ours is subject, but of our own world as it might be made if we did our duty by it..."
For Bacon the inhabitants of Bensalem represent the ideal qualities which he desired rather than hoped to see to be the characteristics of his own country. Moreover, it is not about a new breed of human beings who are superior to Bacon's contemporaries.In this passage which is part of the history of Bensalem, after its discovery and bensalem's covertion to Christianity, Bacon gives the reader an explation to why Bensalem remains hidden. For that purpose Bacon gives first references to Salomona and Solomon's House as a representation of the court of the British King James I, which particularly portrays James I as the new Solomon. Then, Bacon explains the choice of King Salomona to cut off Bensalem from the rest of the world, through the king fears and restrictions.
English: Title page of New Atlantis in the second ...
English: Egg Tempera on Canvas
c. 880Finally, Bacon expresses all these ideas through religious connotations, scattered all along the text. In the same part, Bacon refers to an ancient wisdom that has been lost and replaced by impotent, inferior philosophies, the Platonic myth of Atlantis. New Atlantis is a way to stimulate hope, that this knowledge can be recovered and this civilization of excellence restored.
For a better understanding of King Solamona and the founding of Solomon's House, one's should recall what was said just previously by the Governor:
" There reigned in this island, about nineteen hundred years ago, a King whose memory of all others we most adore; not superstitiously, but as a divine instrument, though a mortal man; his name was Solamona: and we esteem him as the lawgiver...