Page - 350 - in Maximilian Hell (1720–92) - And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

Chapter 8350 allowed to look through Hell’s works in progress on the Expeditio litteraria and heard him praise Danish science. An entry in the diary also includes a rumor on the failed efforts to establish an academy of sciences in Vienna: Professor … tells me that Hell a few years ago was given orders to draw up a plan for the establishment of an academy of sciences in Vienna. In it, physics, astronomy, and mathematics were to be included, just like in the English and French academies. He did draw up this plan, and suggested for the funds of the society the income from the almanacs, which in the first year probably had run to some forty thousand Reichstaler, but which would possibly increase to an annual eighty-eight thousand in the future. A publisher named Trattner was publishing the almanacs of the entire monarchy. He had access to the empress, and having heard rumors of the society, he demanded an audience at her place. Upon entering the cham- ber, he fell to his knees before the portrait of Emperor Francis, which was hanging there on the wall, wailed to it as if to the living emperor, telling him that he was going to lose his monopoly and all his income be divert- ed for physics and heresy. The empress thereupon rejected Hell’s plan.21 “On the other hand,” Hviid presumes that “there may have been a hint of Jesuit- ism involved. For if the first members of the academy came from that compa- ny, then the rest were likely to be selected from the same regiment as well.”22 Following Hviid, one may interpret Hell’s plan of 1774–75 as, at least in part, an attempt to retain the Jesuit heritage. In his letters to Bernoulli and Weiss from this period,23 Hell emphasizes that a part of the funds of the academy were to be used to preserve the Jesuit observatories in Graz, Vienna, and Prague, whose directors were going to be members of the academy as well. If there was, as seems to have been the case, a Jesuit bias in Hell’s academy project, it did not escape the attention of the highest decision-maker. True, throughout the autumn of 1775, Hell still maintained steady communication with the chancellery on the subject of the calendar, and the plan of setting up the Calender-Administrations-Collegium was on the agenda of the Studien- Hof-Commission as late as in April 1776. The committee took pains to find 21 Hviid, Hviids Europa, 370 (entry on November 21, 1778). The manuscript version of Hviid’s diary has not survived. Several names of persons are deliberately left out in the published version of 1787, as here. See the introduction of Michael Harbsmeier and Morten Petersen to the annotated edition referred to here. 22 Hviid, Hviids Europa, 370 (entry on November 21, 1778). 23 Hell to Bernoulli in Berlin, dated Vienna, March 1, 1775 (ubb); Hell to Weiss in Trnava, dated Vienna, January 27, 1775 (Vargha priv.).