Lucien Lévy-Bruhl

Lucien Lévy-Bruhl (1857 to 1939) was a French scholar trained in philosophy who furthered anthropology through his contributions to the new fields of sociology and ethnology. Born in Paris, he took as his primary interest ways of thinking. In How Natives Think (1910) he posited two basic mindsets of humankind, the primitive and the modern: the primitive mind does not separate the supernatural from reality, uses what he called mystical participation to manipulate the world and does not address contradictions, while the modern mind uses reflection and logic. He did not necessarily hold that history leads teleologically from the primitive to the modern mind, and his later Notebooks on Primitive Mentality note that non-logical thought is common in modern societies, as in gambling practices. His concepts of collective representations and participation mystique influenced the psychological theory of Carl Jung. His other works include La philosophie d'Auguste Comte (1900), La mentalité primitive (1922) and La mythologie primitive (1935).