THE UNIVERSE OF INFORMATION.pdf - ideals

of years, was also sold, though Edouard Otlet resisted this for
as long as he could. 3 It brought a quarter of a million francs
in 1903. Above all, father and sons manipulated stock, and in
these dreary, never ending transactions Otlet took a major
share of the burden.
He was soon acutely aware of the changes in his own
situation. His was now no life «strewn with flowers» as it had
once seemed to him as a youth. As early as 1892 he was
sometimes without change for a newspaper or a tram ticket in
his pocket and he was forced to walk to the Palais de Justice
or home from it. He was obliged to borrow money in 1893 and
again in 1896. In 1891 he assessed the price of an independent
life of scholarship at 25,000 francs a year. Indeed, it became
clear that the annual income of 12,000 francs he had been
assured by his father upon his marriage, was no longer certain,
and the disparity between what he had and what he thought
he needed grew ominously great. It seemed that he might have
to leave Brussels for the country. «With a character not adapted
to battle, disdainful of the little things of which life is
made up, scrupulously and stupidly grand seigneur», afficted by
« a continual need of money», facing the prospect of the economy
and obscurity of life in the country, he was in no situation
to be lightly contemplated by one, as it seemed to him, so
little suited to coping with it. «Money!» he exclaimed
the symbol of the battle for existence... I am continually preoccupied
with it. Never did I conceive of the tyranny of money. Weren't we
rich? And, without being extravagent, wasn't the security given by
this richness one of the conditions for my disposition toward speculative
work. Now all our fortune is gone, perhaps momentarily, forever
perhaps ...It is necessary to work, to have a gainful position. In fact,
it might become necessary to sacrifice all the fine projects that I could
have carried out. But these sacrifices are themselves called into
question ten times a day according to the news which comes in from
Nice, from the Proces Normand ... the mines of Soria, from Rio, from
South American upsets. It is slow poison.
In the middle of all these difficulties and uncertainties, he
was presented with yet another which brought into sharper
focus than ever before the unresolved dilemmas of his life. The
Universite Libre de Bruxelles had grown more and more reactionary
in the course of its history, a group of increasingly
vociferous adversaries alleged. Protest against its repressiveness
and intellectual stagnation reached a peak in the 1890's
and boiled over when the university authorities attempted to
muzzle the eminent geographer, Elisee Reclus, who had a reputations
as an anarchist. The Rector was dismissed. The students
staged a strike and the university closed down. Guillaume
de Greef, a lawyer and sociologist whose teaching had become
increasingly influenced by the philosophy of Comte, and
increasingly less acceptable to the University authorities, spoke
out violently against the university's actions. 4 As de Greef
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