THE UNIVERSE OF INFORMATION.pdf - ideals

Perhaps 1932 may be best described as the year in which
the conflicts that attend succession of leadership, following
earlier intimations that they were likely to occur, finally
struck the Institute in a sharply focused form. Otlet,, the old
leader in Brussels, was a man sixty-five years old and of declining
powers. He had grown inflexible and was heavy with
the history of his Institutes. Gradually, he had been forced to
give way to Donker Duyvis who represented a new order. Donker
Duyvis, the young leader in The Hague, was fresher, freer,
more single-minded than Otlet. Unlike Otlet, there was for him
no wearying, increasingly weighty burden of few and small victories
overwhelmed by the more frequent defeat of past aspirations.
Nor was he encumbered by the compulsions of philosophy.
Otlet was, in a sense, rewarded for the renunciations demanded
of him, though he may not have recognised it, by elevation
in the eyes of many to a status high above the often
petty imperatives of politics and action, to that of founder,
benefactor, pioneer, for whom respect and admiration, untrammelled
by daily dealings, could become something like reverence.
From this position his utterances throughout the years
following 1932 commanded attention from those who had previously
begun impatiently to reject them. To those seeking
direction in a simple, concrete, realisable program clearly
and forcefully expressed, he had offered only abstractions,
loftiness of ideal, a preoccupation with the past and a future
evoked in the suspect terms of an antiquated philosophy. Now
his eloquence no longer produced exasperation but, at least,
tolerant affirmation of its generous sentiment, at most, inspiration.
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Whatever the reward, the struggle had upon Otlet a
serious effect. As it progressed he wrote that his «physical, social
and moral forces* were so diminished that he found himself
wishing to be relieved of the work he had undertaken.
«I conceived an institution*, he said, «I developed it. I have
defined the stages of its future extension: the Institute of Bibliography,
the Union of International Associations, the Museum,
the Palais Mondial, the Network for the Mundaneum,
the World City». Confronting him were so many problems
that he believed that it had become necessary that those who
were to be the «beneficiaries» of his work, those who were
«strong and aware», should act to ensure that «any deviation
from the fundamental idea» be prevented. Around them all was
a world torn by «crisis, war, revolutions*. He was himself
in a deplorable financial situation, physically exhausted, unable
to continue his work. The time had come, he believed, for
the promotion of the World City, the final stage in his pro-
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