THE UNIVERSE OF INFORMATION.pdf - ideals

synthesis of knowledge, to bibliography. «The point of departure
for the Pandectes belges», wrote Edmond Picard and Ferdinand
Larcier in the preface to their Bibliographic generate'
et raisonnee du droit beige, a compilation of sources used to
1882 for compiling the Pandectes beiges
was the application to law of the procedures common for many years*
in the natural sciences. The dominating rule of these procedures, as
one knows, is the substitution of direct observation for purely intellectual
and theoretical preconceptions. The basis [of the compilation]'
was the collection of all decisions of our jurisprudence and of the
opinions of our national authors ... Today metaphysics has been banned,
rightly, from Law, as it had been from the natural sciences, and
one no longer attempts to formulate in a priori, all of a piece, by intellectual
effort, as one no longer proceeds thus for chemistry, or
physics, or social philosophy. Facts, observations, then more
observations and facts, to deduce afterwards general truths is the
way to proceed, a procedure which, formulated by Bacon, has gradually
established its Domain and has become the rule for all serious
study. The human mind is no longer considered as an organ which?
produces the sciences, but rather as an apparatus for enregistration,
whose unique role is to observe the laws which emerge from carefully
collected facts and from scrupulously carried out experiments. 14 '
In 1891 under Picard's guidance Otlet and a group of
his colleagues began to publish a journal called Sommaire periodique
des revues du droit. 15 In the compilation of this work
was further practical bibliographical experience for Otlet toadd
to that already derived from his labours on the Pandectes
beiges. In 1892, his ideas about bibliography began to crystallise,
and he wrote an article for Palais, the journal of the
Cercle du Jeune Barreau de Bruxelles on the subject. 16 This
article suggets his debt to the «positivist bibliography* of
Picard as well as to positivist thought more generally.
The social sciences, he observed in this article, can be
approached only through a flood of publications. For those who
are interested in quality and not quantity, the variety and volume
of these publications is a subject of deep concern:
All these books, all these brochures, all these periodical articles thepublication
of which is announced each week by booksellers' catalogs
and notices in special periodicals—-what do they contribute that isnew,
and what is just a matter of phraseology, repetition and inadequate
editing.
After a little reading one might be led to the belief that everything
in sociology has been said already, that everything is,,
in any case, simply a matter of opinion, «that the facts are too
complex for formulation, formulation being always too exclusive
and too tyrannical.» In effect, the social sciences present
themselves to the student not as «one science in terms of materials
and conclusions, but as a grouping of personal appreciations
based on documents gathered together almost without
order or method»- Sociology calls itself positive, but it is so
more in name than in reality, for though rich in data of one
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