Stronglyinfluenced by the Comtean and Spencerian versions of positivism that he hadimbibed in his youth, Otlet was concerned with the progress of the sciences(in the widest sense of the term), believing that a holistic integration of humanknowledge into a single, well-articulated system of sciences could form theintellectual basis for the universal amelioration of human life [15, pp. 20,26–29, 354].