New Atlantis, by Francis Bacon
Absolutely bananas.
My interest in Bacon comes almost entirely via Ada Palmer, who says Bacon invented the notion of progress. To heavily paraphrase Palmer:
the Ancient Greeks had the idea of change, but didn't have the idea of intentionality behind change, a positive arc to the change, an infinite capacity for change, or (most importantly) the expectation of more change in the future. Cities or empires could rise or fall, but fundamentally cities would remain cities, empires would remain empires, and bread would remain bread.
In fact, Medieval Europe believed in "one Cause for all effects", and that cause was God, specifically God communicating moral lessons to his humans. There was no point in asking why anything happened, because the answer was always "God wanted it to happen as part of a chain of events that would eventually teach humanity a helpful lesson." So, God wanted his son Jesus to be executed lawfully by all of humanity (so that the sin and guilt and salvation would be universal); for that he needed the Roman Empire, which lawfully stood for all humanity; for that he needed [whatever specific caesers and battles and whatever other things that happened to get to the point where the Roman Empire controlled all the known world].
Then, in the seventeenth century, Francis Bacon invented progress. [What a sentence! "Francis Bacon invented progress"]. Working together, and using his new Scientific Method, humans could deliberately and methodically uncover the laws of nature and achieve things not thought possible.
In one of those "things we now take for granted" moments, a question you might forget to ask is: why should anyone have believed that the Scientific Method would lead to progress, when they had never previously believed in progress and the Scientific Method had never previously achieved anything at all?
[It would take two hundred years for Bacon's method to develop anything truly useful. "There was a lot of dissecting animals, and exploding metal spheres, and refracting light, and describing gravity, and it was very, very exciting, and a lot of it was correct, but–as the eloquent James Hankins put it–it was actually the nineteenth century that finally paid Francis Bacon’s I.O.U., his promise that, if you channel an unfathomable research budget, and feed the smartest youths of your society into science, someday we’ll be able to do things we can’t do now, like refrigerate chickens, or cure rabies, or anesthetize."]
The reason to believe in the Scientific Method, believe it or not, is that God is Good, and sets things up for the right reasons. "He gave the cheetah speed, the lion claws.... He would not have given us the desire for a better world without the means to make it so. He gave us Reason. So, from His Goodness, we know that Reason must be able to achieve all He has us desire."
The God stuff comes through strongly in New Atlantis. But if Francis Bacon invented progress, he sure as hell didn't invent plot. This book is one not-so-long exercise in... something I can't describe, just moralising in an imaginary setting or something?, I don't know. The contrast with Gulliver's Travels (published 100 years later in 1726) is just staggering – Gulliver's is an enjoyable book in its own rights in modern terms, and even if the plot is not amazing at least things happen. The New Atlantis is, I think, a thoroughly pointless thing to read, I cannot recommend you do it.