THE UNIVERSE OF INFORMATION.pdf - ideals

idea of A, paying attention only to what it could become as
part of the grandiose whole his past theorising had envisaged
as being achievable at some indeterminate future time. What
the RBU was as an actual tool of scholarship, against the demonstrable
efficiency of which his theories might be (and
were) tested, seems not to have much concerned him. His attitude
to all the alarums and encounters in the IID, which so
distressed and exhausted him, seems to have been similar. The
fascination with an abstract ideal of perfect parts in a perfect
whole infinitely larger than the partial world of the IID, the
justifications of anterior theorising, the prospect of future
fulfilment and the ideal conditions that must obtain for it —
these ceaselessly drove his pen. Facing him, rejected, their
importance not clearly understood, not admitted, were practicalities,
questions of efficiency," immediate problems of action,
of co-operation, of co-ordination, of the conflicting opinions, expectations
and self-interest of his many colleagues. Acknowledging
these the IID began hard and realistically limited
work and to enjoy the prospect of some success. Retiring from
them, Otlet, impatient, dispirited, improverished, immured himself
ever more thoroughly within the physical and the conceptual
walls of his Palais Mondial.
«It is necessary», he had written to Geddes in 1925, «to go
over the same ideas, to deepen them and classify them better,
to correlate them, to find a more lively expression for them,
to simplify their presentation, and above all to make them
less local». 13 This was written about his course on «Universalism»
at the Institute of Higher Studies in Brussels. But it
is probably true of everything he wrote in the last fifteen
years of his life. Certainly, he continued to experiment with
his course on universalism. In 1931 it was described as a recourse
of general studies synthesising facts, the object of the
Palais Mondial itself». With some help, pursuing his conviction
that there was a great need for adequate «teaching
aids», Otlet presented a universal «pictorialisation» «in the
form of charts destined for the Atlas of Universal Civilisation,
and a demonstration by recently constructed equipment on the
model of 'planetariums' (sic.) but extended to the world and
the whole of the sciences (Mundanarium)». 14 But as he went
•over and over old ideas in his writings and teachings, he did
so, one might hazard the guess, not to develop and refine
them in the sense of theory interpreting new facts, of new
facts transforming previously held theory, but merely to add
more instances and to organise his work into smaller, more
•clearly discrete sections, like cards in a pack of cards, which
could be shuffled and rearranged.
He seems to have tried to write every day. Each time he
wrote it was on a precise topic — a page, two pages, on occa-
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