Page - 118 - in Maximilian Hell (1720–92) - And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

Chapter 2118 practice. Nor was he generally of a high opinion about Protestant education and learning. Nevertheless, he was by no means averse to professional collabo- ration across denominational boundaries in reasonable cases, and then he cul- tivated a spirit of mutual collegiality. The refutation of Schumacher had con- fessional implications, but this was because of a perceived provocation. But Hell’s apparent cooperation with the Calvinist philosophy professor in Cluj in the 1750s had continuity in the correspondence he maintained a few years  later, for instance, with the medical doctor and polymath István Hatvani (1718–86).74 Hatvani, a somewhat under-appreciated but remarkable figure, was a teach- er of the Calvinist college of Debrecen in eastern Hungary, one of the country’s most important Protestant educational institutions, established in 1538. With support from the municipal council of Debrecen and other sponsors, in the 1740s Hatvani peregrinated to Basel, where he took degrees in theology and medicine, but as he received an invitation to return to Debrecen to teach math- ematics, philosophy, and experimental physics, he also decided to study math- ematics with the Bernoullis. He then spent a brief period at Leiden, taking the opportunity to work with Pieter van Musschenbroek (1692–1761), whose Ele- menta physicae (Elements of physics [1726]) he had already used during his studies in Debrecen. In 1748, Hatvani returned to Debrecen, despite being of- fered teaching positions in Heidelberg, Marburg, and Leiden. He held his inau- gural lecture in January 1749 on the significance of mathematics for theology and its indispensability for physics.75 Hatvani also became a pioneer of experi- ments in electricity in Hungary, using an electrica machina (electrical machine) 74 On Hatvani, see Wurzbach, Biographisches Lexikon (1862), 8:49–50; József Szinnyei, Magy- ar írók élete és munkái (Budapest: Hornyánszky, 1896), 4; Jolán M. Zemplén, A magy- arországi fizika története a xviii. században (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1964), 395–424; Béla Tóth, Hatvani István (Budapest: Közgazdasági és Jogi Könyvkiadó, 1977); Katalin Fe- hér, Hatvani István és tanítványai (Budapest: Országos Pedagógiai Könyvtár és Múzeum, 2002); Miroslav Tibor Morovics and Andrej Šperka, “The Beginnings of Scientific Interest in Electrical Phenomena in Hungarian Kingdom,” in The Global and the Local: The History of Science and the Cultural Integration of Europe; Proceedings of the 2nd iceshs, ed. Michal Kokowski (Cracow, Poland, September 6–9, 2006), 926–33; http://www.2iceshs.cyfronet. pl/2ICESHS_Proceedings/Chapter_29/R-Varia_II_Morovics_Sperka.pdf (accessed April 15, 2019). 75 The lecture was published in the journal Museum Helveticum in Zürich in 1751. According to Hatvani’s interesting concept of “moral evidence,” fully developed in the work men- tioned below in critical engagement with Descartes, Locke, and Leibniz and strong reli- ance on Newton, while the fundamental task of philosophy is the quest for logical, meta- physical, and moral truth, the path to attaining the latter is not dissimilar from procedures of supplying mathematical proof, or the formation of other kinds of evidence via sense perception.