THE UNIVERSE OF INFORMATION.pdf - ideals

Moreover, Otlet's heart was not empty for an even more
cogent reason. Some years before, he had seen his cousin,
Fernande Gloner, take her first communion. By the summer
of 1885 and 17 years old, he had fallen in love with her,
deeply,, insensibly, by the slowest of slow degrees, for she
lived at a distance in Germany, and came only infrequently
to Brussels where he saw her in their grandparents' garden.
At this time, then, he was embroiled in a powerful conflict
between science to which he had long been attracted, and
religion in which he had long been steeped. He was not
original in this by any means, for it was a conflict which
-caused great anguish to many intelligent and sensitive men
of his and later generations, accustomed as they were at once
to hope for some absoluteness in belief and to be sceptical
•of it. Amongst the brilliant company that were to be found
frequently entertained at his father's house, were Edmond
Picard and Otlet's uncle, Paul Heger, a physiologist at the
Universite Libre de Bruxelles. 6 These two were of great
importance in Otlet's early intellectual development. In their
conversations, into which they seemed to have been careful
to draw him (Otlet sometimes reported the conversations at
length in his diary), the contemporary world of art, letters
and science must have come vividly alive. Heger, particularly,
holding the positivist attitude of the practising natural
scientist towards faith and morals, presented Otlet with concepts
of the limitations of speculative philosophy. To the
arguments advanced by these two older friends, Otlet replied
that all that mattered was «the ultimate morality to do good»,
and despite them, that the only real remedy for the social
ills incisively diagnosed on occasion by Picard, was Christianity.
But their evident admiration and sympathy certainly
permitted him no blind faith.
His initial feelings at Louvain of having been a failure,
of disorientation, of being wrenched into manhood by the
abrupt transition from school to university, soon faded. He
worked hard studying philosophy with Thiery and fighting
off the periodic descent of ennervating depression. He flirted
with the idea of playing the game of student politics. For a
moment he was tempted by the idea of working for the university
periodical Progres and of formulating for its pages his
views on the large philosophical, scientific and social questions
which interested him. But the whole of his nature rebelled
against these impulses. His character led him «to an
interior life» not to a public one, to some great work of
science, not of politics. He struggled with these conflicting
feelings, took a vacation in Russia so that distance and time
might sever any compromising ties he might have formed
inadvertently in the university, and returned more determined
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