Seite - 320 - in Maximilian Hell (1720–92) - And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

Chapter 7320 The vehicle for this was a newly established lodge, Zur wahren Eintracht (For genuine harmony), which first met on March 7, 1781, with von Born as its moving spirit.26 Like in the case of von Sonnenfels (also a member of the lodge, and for a while its vice-master), in von Born, too, the character of a public ser- vant and the public intellectual—which otherwise sit awkwardly together— were not only reconciled but drew mutual reinforcement. His passion for natu- ral inquiry led him to do cutting-edge research in the earth sciences, and he even defied the laws regulating the publication of information on mines as industrial secrets by publishing, in several languages, an account of his experi- ences on a journey made in 1770 across the mining regions of Hungary and Transylvania,27 earning him membership in several European academies. His organization of several learned associations has already been noted. At the same time, his scientific adeptness combined with his administrative and management skills made this freethinker an ideal candidate for governmental and courtly positions, such as councilor at the chamber of mines and mints, and custodian of the imperial cabinet of natural history. Von Born, who had been a freemason since his Prague years and in the meantime also joined the more radical brotherhood of the illuminati,28 was elected master of Zur wahren Eintracht a year after its foundation and a few months after his own entry, in March 1782. Under von Born’s leadership, the constitution of the lodge was democratized, and it quickly began to operate as a substitute academy of sciences, promoting and publishing works in the arts and sciences, and opening a space for lectures and discussions to audiences well beyond the scope of its own membership. The lodge cultivated an ethos not only of virtue achieved through sociability29 but also of duty, purpose, and strenuous work—persistent intellectual exertion 26 For an analysis of the central role of this lodge in the Viennese Enlightenment, see Mor- rison, “Pursuing Enlightenment,” Chapter 4, 178–242. On von Born, see the literature men- tioned above in Chapter 1, 52 n 45. 27 Von Born’s Briefe über mineralogische Gegenstände auf seiner Reise durch den Temeswarer Banat, Siebenbürgen, Ober- und Nieder-Ungarn was published under the pseudonym of Johann Jakob Ferber in 1774 in Frankfurt and Leipzig, and then in translations in London (1777), Venice (1778), and Paris (1780). 28 On the secret society of the illuminati, founded at the University of Ingolstadt by profes- sor of canon and natural law Adam Weishaupt (1748–1830) in 1776, see Richard van Dül- men: Der Geheimbund der Illuminaten (Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 1977); Helmut Reinalter, ed., Der Illuminatenorden (1776–1785/87): Ein politischer Geheimbund der Aufklärungszeit (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1997). 29 On the overtones of Shaftesburian moral aestheticism in the Viennese Enlightenment, see Ernst Wangermann, “‘By and by we shall have an enlightened populace’: Moral Optimism