THE UNIVERSE OF INFORMATION.pdf - ideals

was different from Brussels with its small, comfortable bourgeoisie.
Picard had introduced him to the Belgian poet Lemonnier,
who was often in Paris. His grandfather had introduced
him to another Belgian poet, Rodenbach, who had given
up law and the Palais de Justice in Brussels and Belgium
itself for Paris and the Symbolist Movement in French literature.
In the literary circles to which his acquaintance with
these men gave him entree, he made a few acquaintances —
he met Mallarme, for example, and attended dances, dinners
and reviews. He observed the decolletage of the women and
their jealous and petty ways with a caustic tongue and disapproving
eye. He was attractel and repulsed by the prostitutes
in the streets. More completely than ever before he was alone.
And with his family and his small circle of friends no longer
about him he decided in one of the depressions that settled like
the Paris winter on him: «I am not made for solitude».
During the months of his stay in Paris, his father several
times raised the problem of his future career and of his probable
marriage. Who was to succeed this formidable man who
had developed the family fortunes to the peak they had then
attained? That was a question no good son of the nineteenth
century might ignore. That fortune, as the product of the
effort of one man, was an admirable and enviable grande
oeuvre and for Otlet there was a compelling duty to see that
it and the spheres of family interests were maintained and
extended. After long and painful soul searching he eventually
decided to enter the world of business with his father when
he completed his studies, and to sacrifice for Fernande,
whom he was determined now to make his wife, all his ambitions
in science. «If I can't have Fenny», he wrote, «I shall
be a desperate man.»
It should be understood, however, that this was not an
easy surrender. During his stay of about six months in Paris,
Otlet worked as hard as ever at his studies. Sociology, law,
political economy and some history continued to be the
subjects of his speculations. But they seemed now to chase
their tails in his head without going very far forward and
this may have led to an easier renunciation of them. In February
of 1889 he went to pay his family a visit in their newly
purchased and elegant villa at Nice the villa Valere, named
for his stepmother. Here, finally, he capitulated to agnosticism.
Indeed, he began to realise when he returned to Paris after
brooding through the long, wearying days of his stay at Nice,
that metaphysics, which had once meant so much to him, was
actually a snare and a delusion. When he applied it to life «I
come everywhere to irreducible antinomies*. Chance, he decided,
not design, presided over the development of ideas, «the develop-
2* 19