ABSTRACT
Helene Metzger believed that Lucien Levy-Bruhl’s work was very relevant to the history of science, and indeed envisaged a collaboration between ethnology and history of science which would afford ‘a more precise view of the structure of the human mind’. In the work she published in her lifetime, Metzger only discussed religion as a historian, in the same way in which she described any other system of beliefs and worldview. Metzger was confident that Levy-Bruhl’s theories, suitably interpreted, could ‘help the historian of science penetrate the mind of scientists whose work he studies’, despite the differences in their respective subject matter. Both she and Levy-Bruhl aimed to understand minds that at first look alien, and to isolate the concepts and assumptions that govern them. Metzger’s examples of medieval sorcery, and of astrology, might suggest that she saw a connection between current African and Melanesian mystical thought and past European thought.
