ABSTRACT
Bachelard intended to ‘correct’ the sociological approach to the study of the mind with a psychoanalytical interpretation. He thought that British ethnology projected a modern rationality onto the non-rational practices and beliefs of primitive people. While the British ethnologists overemphasised the homogeneity of modern and primitive mentalities, he believed that Lévy-Bruhl on the contrary presented them as too separate, i.e. as belonging to different peoples. By contrast, Bachelard thought that ‘primitive mentality’ was detectable in the texts of natural philosophy, in alchemic treatises, in the philosophy of Francis Bacon and René Descartes, and so on. More importantly he believed that primitive mentality was by no means alien to contemporary Western people. Even the scientist was for him a primitive when not at work, and in particular when dreaming and imagining. As we have seen, for Bachelard the best way of re-creating a primitive worldview was poetry. He believed that what primitive and modern people had in common was irrational attitudes and beliefs, rather than rational thinking.
