The early years of Isis are examined in the light of George Sarton's connection with Paul Otlet (1868 -1944) and Henri Lafontaine (1854Lafontaine ( -1943, founders in 1895 of the International Office of Bibliography and in 1907 of the Union of International Associations, both in Brussels. Otlet, known as one of the fathers of the Information Age, invented the science of information, which he called, in French, documentation. Lafontaine, a socialist senator in Belgium, won the 1913 Nobel Prize for Peace. Sarton shared Otlet and Lafontaine's views about pacifism, internationalism, and rational bibliography; he designed Isis to fit with the modernist goal, expressed by Otlet and Lafontaine, of using information to generate new knowledge.
SARTON'S EGOGeorge Sarton, whose faith in the progress of learning has earned him the inappropriate identification of "positivist," was surely an inconsistent scientist. (See Figure 1.) As a student who left the humanities for science, he inverted what has become, in our own time, the usual argument advanced by intellectuals who leave science for the humanities-the move would allow him the better to connect with life, he contended. While he labored on a prizewinning chemical investigation (in, roughly, the equivalent of a current American master's thesis), he lectured and wrote on philosophy and politics, and he romanced a talented English artist. In 1911 he took a doctorate at the University of Ghent in exact sciences, writing a dissertation not on the revolutionary new physics but, rather, on the classical mechanics of Isaac Newton. He worked briefly as an astronomer and as an instructor in a girls' school before resigning himself to exhausting his inheritance in the pursuit of the general history of science. In this pursuit, he and his artist wife, Mabel Elwes, breathed life into the present journal, Isis.Civilization, in George Sarton's view, had two poles of reference: science and art. To make sense of history required deep familiarity with each pole. In common with others of
