SOURCE: Smith, Roch. “Gaston Bachelard and the Power of Poetic Being.” French Literature Series 4 (1977): 234-38.

In the following essay, Smith examines the relationship between Bachelard's works on science and on the imagination.

A major feature of Gaston Bachelard's epistemological work is his observation that modern science, in its search for knowledge, goes beyond immediate reality. In Le Nouvel Esprit scientifique, for instance, he points out that “L'observation scientifique … transcende l'immédiat; elle reconstruit le réel après avoir reconstruit ses schémas.”¹ Through mathematics, science creates a world that shakes our faith in the reality of objects around us as it demonstrates “la fragilité des connaissances premières.”² What we normally think of as “real”, that is the world of objects, becomes an epistemological obstacle when mathematical relation replaces substance as the basis of reality. The result is that reason isolates man from the familiar world of...