Page - 361 - in Maximilian Hell (1720–92) - And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

361Coping with Enlightenments What Hell’s unfolding conflict with Mesmer illustrates is that while he was aware of the emergence of vitalistic theories and the related scientific practic- es, he viewed them with suspicion and remained an inveterate mechanist. He even looked down on Mesmer’s experimentations with the same kind of con- tempt he had toward the lack of “exactitude” he supposed to have diagnosed in Pray’s linguistic work. The remarkable blend of bursting into a field of knowl- edge beyond his own specialization and behaving provocatively—again, just like in the case of language and history, but this time before the eye of the public—may also have been a product of the disaffection, anxiety, and insecu- rity Hell presumably felt during the immediate post-suppression years, as well as the perceived need to prove himself an all-round scholar worthy of leading an academy of sciences. A final interesting point is Hell’s hint to Weiss that in order to attain the desired therapeutic results, it might be sufficient to pretend that the metal is magnetized. In a very rudimentary form, this seems to antici- pate the position of the experts employed in the famous 1784 investigation of mesmerism in Paris (itself echoing an important strain in eighteenth-century thought): that even in the absence of any alleged “magnetic fluids” (or magne- tized metal), the imagination is capable of having dramatic effects on the body—that belief in the curative effect is almost the cure itself.57 An astonished Mesmer gave vent to his frustration over Hell’s sudden change of heart in writing, to which Hell replied in kind, but in the end he assured the readers that all “misunderstandings” between the two of them had been clari- fied, and reconciliation had taken place.58 If this was real, no similar happy end could be expected to conclude the hostility initiated by von Born several years later. At the height of the “flood of pamphlets” in 1783, von Born—a one-time Jesuit for just sixteen months who left the order before his novitiate in 1760, and by this time already the star of the Viennese Enlightenment as the master of Zur wahren Eintracht—published his main work as an anti-clerical satirist. The Specimen monachologiae, methodo Linnaeano, tabulis tribus aeneis illustra­ tum (Specimen of the natural history of the various orders of monks, after the manner of the Linnæan system, also published in German, French, and Eng- lish) by “Joannes Physiophilus” (von Born’s pseudonym)59 is cast as an academic 57 Riskin, Science in the Age of Sensibility, 209–25. 58 Mesmer’s response was published both separately on January 19, 1775, Sammlung, 31–37, and in the WD, no. 6. (January 21, 1775): 9–11. For Hell’s rejoinder, dated January 29, 1775, see WD, no. 10 (February 4, 1775): 9–11. 59 Scholars usually attribute the work to Born; for doubts, see Josef Haubelt, Studie o Ignaci Bornovi (Prague: Univ. Karlova, 1973), cf. Evans, Austria, Hungary, and the Habsburgs, 46n35.