THE UNIVERSE OF INFORMATION.pdf - ideals

told his supporters after he had been suspended, «I am for
free, positive science*, and the University had gone out of its
way to find as a replacement for him someone who could declare
that «M. de Greef detests metaphysics as much as I love
it... while he loves Positivism as much as I abhor it.» 5 In October
1894, taking what seemed the only course remaining open
to them, Picard, de Greef and a number of colleagues broke
with the Universite Libre and founded a new university, the
Nouvelle Universite de Bruxelles. The Faculties of Law, and
Philosophy and Letters were the first constituted, together
with an Institute of Higher Studies. This last was an innovative
addition to the traditional university structure of faculties
by which it was hoped that this university, in contrast to the
Universite Libre, might become responsive to the exigencies
of contemporary society.
Today positive knowledge tends to have a more and more considerable
action on all the branches of human activity, from industrial production
to the elaboration of laws and political organisation of societies,
and the links uniting all the individual sciences appear more and more
clear. A view, at the same time speculative and practical, of the synthetic
whole of the intellectual domain is therefore indispensable... It
is the acquisition of synthetic knowledge that the new university
wished to facilitate by its Institute of Higher Studies ... the teaching is
therefore at the same time encyclopedic and practical. 6
To the banner hoisted above the New University by Picard
and de Greef flocked many of Otlet's friends and acquaintances.
The request to Otlet to join this group come from La
Pontaine: «Well then! Have you decided to give us a subscription
and a course at the New University? You know our
goals, what we hope for, you approve of our ideas... There it is,
a 'yes', or a 'no'! Why conditions, distinctions?* But conditions
and distinctions were the stuff of life to Otlet's cautious, reflective
character. As he probed the consequences of a decision
he exposed the toils of the conflicting attitudes in which his
will to decisive, irrevocable action was so strongly caught. On
the one hand lay his duty towards his family, their business
affairs and the law. On the other lay his independence, his
desire for the cloistered isolation of a life of scholarship. If he
refused La Fontaine's request, he felt he turned his back on all
that he had dreamed of doing in bibliography and in other
aspects of the social sciences. Yet to accede to it would commit
him to a particular group, a party, and his nature rebelled
against the idea of partisan confinement.
Further, if he joined the New University, what would happen
to his own family? How could he ensure their security
against the future. What would he be able to leave as a patrimony
to his children, once he was committed to the comparative
poverty of a professorship? 7 And then there was his father
struggling to reconstitute the unexpectedly diminished family
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