Seite - 385 - in Maximilian Hell (1720–92) - And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

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.