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385Coping
with Enlightenments
However, especially for Orczy, this was not the only guilt of the astronomers,
and generally representatives of the natural sciences. While “measuring un-
known corners of the world,” “descending in the bowels of the earth, searching
in its crust for its beginnings,” and so forth, they “besiege the Gods once again”:147
they were trespassing in the territory of metaphysics, where their sciences
lacked authority. “Such is, my dear Reverend Father, the lunatic error of the
human mind, if no limits are set to its dazzling conceit and sinful pride,” Orczy
wrote in his commentary, resembling the distinction of Francis Bacon, in a
much earlier phase of the “new science,” between “pure knowledge” and “proud
knowledge” in the Advancement of Learning.148 The ascription of universalistic
aims and potentials, in the novel Kantian mode, to disciplines like astronomy,
geology and mineralogy, evolutionary botany and anthropology, was becoming
a trade mark of the scientific milieu in Göttingen, where Hell was elected a
member of the academy, and where “Lappianism” was appreciated and pro-
moted by men like von Schlözer. The aversion evoked by the social- and politi-
cal-ideological implications of the theory of the Demonstratio became voiced
in terms of a discrepancy between scientific paradigms, too.149
Returning to Bessenyei’s argument, in the subsequent explicit comparison
the lens of manners shows the “Scythian” and the “Lapp” to be separated by a
yawning gap:
The Lapp, when standing erect, is barely three elbows tall: he has a ghast-
ly wide mouth, always kept open; his head is like a pigeon-house on his
short body; his eyes are tiny and sunk deep in the head; his thorax is thick
and swollen; his nose is short and flat; his long, protruding chin has no
hair. Besides this ugliness of form, the Lapp is vile and fearful, it is such a
subterranean mole nation, which loathes the fight; for the same reason, it
never wages war. The desire for secular fame and glory has never occurred
to them. But the extraordinary coldness of the country creates and
147 Révai, Két nagyságos.
148 Balogh, “‘Scytha vagyok, nem Lappon,’” 196. Cf. “It was not the pure knowledge of nature
and universality, a knowledge by the light whereof man did give names to other creatures
of the Paradise […] but it was the proud knowledge of good and evil, with an intent in
man to give law unto himself, and to depend no more on God’s commandments, which
was the form of the temptation.” Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning and New
Atlantis, ed. Arthur Johnstone (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 6.
149 For the Göttingen approach to the disciplines, see Luigi Marino, Praeceptores Germaniae:
Göttingen 1770–1820 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1995 [Italian original: Turin:
Einaudi, 1975]). For Orczy’s criticism, see Balogh, “‘Scytha vagyok, nem Lappon,’” 188.
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book Maximilian Hell (1720–92) - And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe"
Maximilian Hell (1720–92)
And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe
- Title
- Maximilian Hell (1720–92)
- Subtitle
- And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe
- Authors
- Per Pippin Aspaas
- László Kontler
- Publisher
- Brill
- Location
- Leiden
- Date
- 2020
- Language
- English
- License
- CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
- ISBN
- 978-90-04-41683-3
- Size
- 15.5 x 24.1 cm
- Pages
- 492
- Categories
- Naturwissenschaften Physik
Table of contents
- Acknowledgments VII
- List of Illustrations IX
- Bibliographic Abbreviations X
- Introduction 1
- 1 Shafts and Stars, Crafts and Sciences: The Making of a Jesuit Astronomer in the Habsburg Provinces 37
- 2 Metropolitan Lures: Enlightened and Jesuit Networks, and a New Node of Science 91
- 3 A New Node of Science in Action: The 1761 Transit of Venus and Hell’s Transition to Fame 134
- 4 The North Beckons: “A desperate voyage by desperate persons” 172
- 5 He Came, He Saw, He Conquered? The Expeditio litteraria ad Polum Arcticum 209
- 6 “Tahiti and Vardø will be the two columns […]”: Observing Venus andDebating the Parallax 258
- 7 Disruption of Old Structures 305
- 8 Coping with Enlightenments 344
- Appendix 1 Map of the Austrian Province of the Society of Jesus (with Glossary of Geographic Names) 394
- Appendix 2 Instruction for the Imperial and Royal Astronomer Maximilian Hell, S.J 398
- Bibliography 400
- Index 459