THE UNIVERSE OF INFORMATION.pdf - ideals

always, that of finding an occupation «where there is much intellectual
life... where there will be great diversity which will
lead to something real for myself and society»- He looked
vainly for some end, some goal, however vague it might be,
which could become a basis for «attacking everything*. He
yearned for «a guide, to be involved in some company of work
under the direction of some leader who will bring me to the
conquest of a great ideal»- In a moment of introspection, he
observed that he was a man
who has little need for the society of appearances, of public opinion,
but only for the society of some few good friends, and above all of
their ideas. A man who loves unanswerable questions. A man who desires
to effect an oeuvre, something continuing, grand and absorbing.
Yet when he looked around him, all that could be observed
abroad was the spectre of intellectual anarchy. «It seems that
facts are too complex to be embraced by our brains» Everywhere
new ideas were appearing but they seemed to him «toogeneral,
too contradictory, too confused yet to guide vigorous
action». For himself, he had developed such an awareness of
their complexity that he had been led away from a belief in
their «absolute systematisation»- His own ideas, indeed, had'
become in some way fluid and shapeless. «I don't have any
fixed ideas, but embryos of different ideas, never pushed to^
conclusions, like a vague sentiment that holds them grouped*.
Perhaps he could not say so clearly and surely in 1892 what
he had asserted so boldly only the year before, that his interest
was above all «in the universal life* whose «synthetic expression
at each moment of its evolution* it was his abiding pleasure
to discover. Nevertheless be continued to cultivate, could
not escape a preoccupation with, the notion of a «unifying,
grouping sentiment* which demanded that he study «thewhole,
the laws of the progress of society, of psychology*.
In attempting to understand Otlet's intellectual dilemmas
and the solutions he was on the brink of discovering for them
one should stand back a little to see him in the context of his
times. His thought was by no means original. He had absorbed
and rejected the religious teaching of the Jesuits for Positivism.
The essence of Positivism as developed in the middle'
of the nineteenth century by Auguste Comte, lay in the Law
of Three Stages and the Classification of the Sciences. The Law
of the Three Stages asserted that as the mind developed, it
passed through a stage of theological explanation of the
world, to a stage of metaphysical explanation, to the final
positive stage where all could be explained in terms of scientific
truth. As the mind progressed through these stages, it
did so in a definite order of .disciplines which became increasingly
interdependent and complex. At the first level stood
mathematics, followed by physics and chemistry, then came