THE UNIVERSE OF INFORMATION.pdf - ideals

City. A brief examination of Belgium's place in the World
Plan was the basis for the fuller study of Plan beige. The
pivotal role of «documentation» in Otlet's thought (for it was
the point from which his speculations and essays in international
organisation always departed and to which they always
returned) was expressed very clearly in Monde. For him
it related to «expression», the sixth term of his equation:
Work — book — book as instrument of human thought — thought, the
essence of the human being and also the instrument of a milieu which
extends, enlarges, amplifies human being. As the world goes now, on
the lines of hyper-separatism, there will soon be only documentation
to establish regular and benevolent contact between man. 36
In his discussion of documentation, Otlet showed once again
that receptivity to technological innovation, a foreshadowing
of future inventions, which had already appeared from time
to time in his writing:
Man would no longer need documentation if he were to become an
omniscient being like God himself. A less ultimate degree would create
an instrumentation acting across distance which would combine at
the same time radio, x-rays, cinema and microscopic photography.
All the things of the Universe, and all those of man, would be
registered from afar as they were produced. Thus the moving image
of the world would be established — its memory, its true duplicate.
Any one from afar would be able to read the passage, expanded or
limited to the desired subject, projected on his individual screen.
Thus, in his armchair, any one would be able to contemplate the whole
of creation or certain of its parts. 37
Though Otlet showed himself as something of a visionary
whose visions later, long after his death, assumed some reality,
he was also a product of his times and particularly of his
positivistic philosophy of universalism. In these major works,
the Traile and Monde, the fruits of a lifetime's labour, there
is implicit a belief that the method of analysis and the presentation
of material which they exhibit are scientific, that
«social facts» can be isolated, set down and related, thereby
providing a basis for the derivation of a rational, necessary
plan of world organisation and action which would advance
the general welfare of Humanity. «Humanity», for Otlet, was
a unitary concept, something graspable and directable as a
whole, and social facts and laws were expressible in formulae.
These formulae, however, were not «scientific». They were
purely descriptive. They allowed no prediction as a form of
deduced consequence from them. The result, an absence of
theory and a vast collocation of diverse observations, is extraordinarily
sterile. Otlet placed a value on enumeration that
was an exact correlate of his belief in a universal classification
of knowledge. His work was a piling of instance upon
example, and a careful integration and classification of data
in support of a number of fairly pious, general, prescriptive
statements. One manifestation of his «atomistic» approach was-
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