THE UNIVERSE OF INFORMATION.pdf - ideals

my room); and Science (plan of study, memoires of my observations.)»
Perhaps more than anything else, these classifications
reveal the young Otlet to the curious eye. Twelve years later,
having continued to search, he was to find a powerful bibliographic
classification which was to become in his eyes a
tool for organising notes and papers into a giant compendium
of universal knowledge, and the techniques for creating this
compendium or encyclopedia and its significance for society
exercised his thought until his death at the age of 76. Even
as a child, then, he strove for an order and wholeness that
comes from the application of an established system of classification
to disparate items. Once he had been «frightened»
by the diversity of the things he had written. «My God!», he
had exclaimed when he was fifteen, «what a feather brain
I am, always on to something new, beginning and never finishing
anything. I write down everything that goes through
my mind, but none of it has a sequel. At the moment there
is only one thing I must do; that is, to gather together my
material of all kinds, and connect in with everything else I
have done up till now. I do not have enough yet to do
anything much with it. I must wait and leave all this aside
for the moment.»
Five years later as he set off to study in Paris in 1888,
to prepare his historically oriented, universalist synthesis of
knowledge, he was much further along. His papers now fell
into seven groups corresponding to large subject areas and
were listed in his diary as: «Philosophy (. . . syntheses of a
kind, deep studies of the present); social sciences (the past>
the present); writing (...articles, social works); Diary (intimate
notes); Law; Scientific facts; Politics and moral questionings.»
PARIS, SPIRITUAL DISILLUSION
And so twenty years old, in love, eager for the experience
of a new stage in his intellectual odyssey, he arrived in Paris
ready to chart the seas of late nineteenth century positivist
thought. But Paris itself, to which he brought his «synthetic
formula* which he assumed would illuminate new contexts,
without being itself modified by them, proved to have a confusing,
shocking complexity of its own. To a degree it drove
his formula out of his head. Paris was so much larger than
Brussels. The populace was cosmopolitan, witty, elegant, given
to swift, allusive conversation. It lived for pleasure. It was
the Paris that a few years later was to fascinate Marcel
Proust. A place where the world «comes to take notes», it
puzzled, charmed and perhaps appalled him. In every way it
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