Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci.

39 (2008) 384–392

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Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci.

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/shpsa

From phenomenology to phenomenotechnique: the role of early

twentieth-century physics in Gaston Bachelard’s philosophy
Cristina Chimisso
Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Arts, The Open University, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes MK7 6AA, UK

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Keywords: Bachelard regarded the scientific changes that took place in the early twentieth century as the beginning
Gaston Bachelard of a new era, not only for science, but also for philosophy. For him, the theory of relativity and quantum
Léon Brunschvicg mechanics had shown that a new philosophical ontology and a new epistemology were required. I show
Phenomenotechnique that the type of philosophy with which he was more closely associated, in particular that of Léon Bruns-
Chosisme
chvicg, offered to him a crucial starting point. Brunschvicg never considered scientific objects as indepen-
Theory of relativity
dent of the mind, and as a consequence questions such as the existence of particles independently of the
Quantum mechanics
mind, theory or apparatus, were absent from his philosophy, which was rather aimed at analyzing the
mind critically, and above all historically. Bachelard accepted the fundamental ideas of Brunschvicg’s phi-
losophy; however, his own reading of contemporary science enabled him to go beyond it, as shown by his
emphasis on the social production of knowledge, and by his removal of the distinction between ideas and
technologically produced objects of knowledge. For him, modern science teaches philosophy that knowl-
edge is not a phenomenology but rather a ‘phenomenotechnique’. I argue that Bachelard’s view that phi-
losophy ‘should follow science’ stems from moral considerations.
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1. Introduction
The era of the new scientific mind could be very precisely dated
from 1905, when Einstein’s relativity came along and deformed
primordial concepts that we thought were fixed forever. From
then on, reason multiplied its objections, dissociating funda-
mental ideas and then making new connections between them,
trying out the boldest of abstractions. Over a period of twenty-
five years, ideas appear that signal an amazing intellectual
maturity, any one of which would suffice to shed lustre on
the century. Among these are quantum mechanics, Louis de
Broglie’s wave mechanics, Heisenberg’s physics of matrices, Dir-
ac’s mechanics, abstract mechanics, and doubtless there will
soon be abstract physics which will order all the possibilities
of experience. (Bachelard, 1993 [1938], p. 19)
There is no doubt that Gaston Bachelard regarded the dramatic
developments that took place in early twentieth-century physics
as the beginning of a new era, not only for science itself, but also
for philosophy. The new physics had shaken common sense
assumptions about time, space, causality and indeed the very bases
of philosophical ontology. Far from trying to reconcile contempo-
rary physics with traditional philosophical concepts, not to men-
tion common sense, Bachelard thought that the former should
lead the way to a revolution in our way of conceiving the world
and of reasoning. It was contemporary science that for Bachelard
had completed the rupture between scientific knowledge and com-
mon knowledge, and in so doing had started the ‘fourth’ period of
philosophy—the contemporary period—following the ancient
period, the Middle Ages and the Modern era (Bachelard, 1986
[1949], p. 102). He remarked that ‘science in effects creates philos-
ophy’ (Bachelard, 1991 [1934], p. 7), and that reason itself ‘should
obey science’. However, he argued, science changes across time,
and as a consequence reason should obey ‘the most highly evolved
science, science in the process of evolution’ (Bachelard, 1988
[1940], p. 144). The philosophical concepts of time, movement

E-mail address: c.chimisso@open.ac.uk

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 C. Chimisso / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 39 (2008) 384–392
and causality were for him based on nineteenth-century science,
and they did not reflect the impressive ‘rupture’ that science had
experienced at the beginning of the twentieth century. Indeed, a
large part of Bachelard’s polemics with some contemporary philos-
ophers rested on his perception that they based their theories on
concepts that had been superseded in the sciences. For him the
philosophy of physics lead to a rejection of current epistemological
doctrines, such as positivism, pragmatism and realism, which in
his words become ‘positivist agnosticism’, ‘pragmatic tolerance’
and ‘traditional philosophical realism’ (Bachelard, 1991 [1934], p.
9). These doctrines were in his view still rooted in pre-twentieth-
century science and rationality, and still linked to an immediate,
intuitive and common sense way of looking at the world.
The philosophical meaning that Bachelard attached to contem-
porary physics did not necessarily coincide with that attributed to
it by many scientists, or by many contemporary philosophers. How-
ever, I shall argue that the philosophical tradition with which Bach-
elard was most closely associated lent solid bases for a philosophy
which would embrace the counter-intuitive character of the new
physics. This philosophical tradition, especially in the form given
to it by Bachelard’s professor and mentor Léon Brunschvicg, was
particularly attentive to modern science, and particularly receptive
to the philosophical significance of its innovations. This openness to
scientific novelty was based on a historicist conception of knowl-
edge. I shall explain. Brunschvicg saw as the aim of his philosophy
that of analysing the mind, and to investigate the ways in which
knowledge develops. His analysis of knowledge, and science in par-
ticular, was done a posteriori: rather than developing an epistemol-
ogy starting from principles and rules, he aimed at extracting these
principles and rules from scientific and philosophical texts. He be-
lieved that the structure of knowledge is different in different times,
indeed that knowledge develops and progresses by changing, some-
times radically, its central concepts and aims. He therefore needed
to study history of science and history of philosophy as comprehen-
sively as possible, and to investigate texts from different epochs. He
regarded contemporary science as the most advanced type of
knowledge, and believed that its analysis would reveal how the con-
temporary mind works and what its principles and values are.
Quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity presented
many problems for philosophy, as they appeared to violate tradi-
tional philosophical conceptions, for instance of time, space, cau-
sality and substance, and the distinction between the subject and
object of knowledge. However, Bachelard found in his philosophi-
cal training an approach that allowed him to regard what appeared
as ambiguities or contradictions to other philosophers as the foun-
dations of a new philosophy. In particular, the conception, present
in Brunschvicg’s philosophy, of the object as mind-dependent
meant that the question of the existence of microparticles as inde-
pendent of the mind never arose, and that the fact that observa-
tions of microphysical systems necessarily involved an
interference by the observer was not problematic. It was from
his own observation of contemporary physics, however, that Bach-
elard conceptualised one of the most interesting aspects of his phi-
losophy: the erosion of the boundary between the theoretical and
the technical part of science. His original concept of ‘phenomeno-
technique’ results from his reading of the practices of contemporary
physics, and supports his revision of traditional philosophical
views concerning the existence and essence of things. I shall dis-
cuss Bachelard’s interpretation of modern physics in the context
of his philosophical background and questions. In the concluding
1
For the importance of Brunschvicg, both as a philosopher and as a ‘mandarin’ (as Aron put it), see also: Worms (2005); Bourdieu (1988 [1984]), p. 93; and Aron (2003 [1983]),
p. 38.
2
For the relation between Bachelard’s and Brunschvicg’s philosophies, see also: Dagognet (1965); Gutting (2005), p. 4; Gagey (1969), pp. 30, 54; Vinti (1997), pp. 168, 427–452;
Brenner (2003), p. 102. In my book Writing the History of the Mind, I examine the roots of historical epistemology in the ideas of Brunschvicg and Lévy-Bruhl (Chimisso, 2008).
3
See Brunschvicg’s letters to Sarton of 29 December 1922 and 2 February 1923, Houghton Library, bMS Am 1803 (218).
385
part, I shall suggest the reasons why Bachelard thought that philos-
ophy should follow science.
2. At the roots of Bachelard’s third way: beyond the traditional
philosophical dichotomies
For Bachelard traditional philosophical doctrines, such as ratio-
nalism and empiricism, idealism and materialism, and realism and
positivism had had their time. It is not by chance that one of his
books on modern science is entitled Rational materialism: for him
the traditional dichotomy between rationalism and materialism
had been made obsolete by the advancement of the sciences. In
his view, the alternatives to which philosophy had grown used
had been dramatically exploded by modern physics. It is in his dis-
cussion of microphysics that he developed his critique of the tradi-
tional philosophical distinctions between theory and experiment,
scientific object and experimental apparatus, and even between
substance and attributes. Teresa Castelão-Lawless has argued that
Bachelard’s lack of distinction between theory and experiment was
radically different from the mainstream philosophy of science of
the period. She is right, especially when she clarifies that by main-
stream philosophy of science she means the Vienna Circle’s and
Karl Popper’s (Castelão-Lawless, 1995, p. 11). However, the tradi-
tion of French philosophy to which Bachelard belonged made
available to him the intellectual tools not only to reject such dis-
tinction, but also to expel it from the set of philosophical problems.
Starting from the standpoints of this tradition, Bachelard was in a
position to develop an original philosophy by reflecting on modern
physics, as I shall show.
The most important exponent of this philosophical tradition
was Léon Brunschvicg, professor of history of modern philosophy,
and, according to many, one of the most influential philosophers of
the first half of the twentieth century in France (Deschoux, 1969, p.
5).1 Bachelard, who was a student of Brunschvicg, has been pre-
sented as the scholar who freely developed Brunschvicg’s philosophy
(Wahl, 1962, p. 114), and his ‘view of the relation of science and phi-
losophy’ as ‘most directly’ derived from Brunschvicg (Gutting, 2001,
pp. 85–86).2 Many of Brunschvicg’s works look at first sight as histo-
ries of science. For instance, Les étapes de la philosophie mathématique
(Brunschvicg, 1912) is chronologically very thorough, starting from
chapters on the origin of the concept of number to proceed to
Pythagoreanism, Euclid, Descartes on geometry, and from Zeno to
Kepler, Pascal, Fermat up to Lobachevsky, Riemann and Cauchy.
The same historical approach can be seen in books like L’expérience
humaine et la causalité physique (Brunschvicg, 1922) and others deal-
ing with history of philosophy and thought (e.g., Brunschvicg, 1927,
1934). However, when asked by George Sarton to collaborate more
closely with Isis, he replied that he was not a historian of science,
but rather a philosopher who studied the mind.3
Brunschvicg’s aim was to examine the ways in which human
beings had thought in the past and think in the present, in partic-
ular when faced with mathematical problems and the study of nat-
ure. Two aspects of his approach are interesting here: one is his
detailed analysis of the history of scientific doctrines, and the other
that he never judged these doctrines in terms of their success in
representing the physical world. As far as the latter characteristic
of his work is concerned, it is a consequence of his epistemology
and of his concept of truth. Brunschvicg judged as naı¨ve and
‘common sense’ (in the French pejorative meaning) the belief
that there is a dichotomy between ideas on the one hand and
386 C. Chimisso / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 39 (2008) 384–392

mind-independent things on the other. If these independent things
exist, he argued, we cannot say anything about them (Brunschvicg,
1921, pp. 47–48). Similarly, the idea that truth is something inde-
pendent of us, and external to us, is for him a naı¨ve conception. In
his view, truth has its source in the mind, for it is the mind that
establishes intelligible relationships between phenomena (ibid.,
pp. 86–87). He followed Kant in defining truth as the result of
the mutual relation between the mind and experience; and he
stressed that this relation is between the human mind and human
experience. It is easy to see that Brunschvicg’s philosophy is a type
of idealism, as he himself admits (see, for example, Brunschvicg,
1923, p. 170), and of the Kantian variety. He is indeed normally
classed as a neo-Kantian, and this is right in many ways, first of
all because his philosophy is aimed at critically examining knowl-
edge and at assessing the capabilities of the mind.
There is an important aspect of his philosophy, however, which
departs from Kant’s inspiration, although for him his disagreement
with Kant was his way of being ‘more faithful than Kant to the spirit
of critical idealism’.4 For Brunschvicg, Kant had been wrong to char-
acterize his table of categories as universally valid, and more in gen-
eral to present the conditions of knowledge as ahistorical. He argued
that Kant claimed to have described the ‘intellectus archetypus’, the
ideal form of intellect, but in fact he had only described the form of
Newtonian science (Brunschvicg, 1922, p. 552; 1923, p. 147). The a
prioris of Transcendental aesthetics, that is absolute space and time,
no longer correspond, for Brunschvicg, to the bases of contemporary
‘speculation’ (Brunschvicg, 1922, p. 458), by which he meant contem-
porary physics and geometry. Many philosophers, he believed, were
still trapped in a Newtonian world, including Henri Bergson, who,
when criticising science, in fact targeted classic physics, ignoring
the revolutions of the twentieth-century (ibid., p. 591).5 His criticism
of Kant explains why he needed to analyse the history of thought. If
there are no categories given once and for all, and if ways of thinking
change, it is not possible to reach general conclusions about the mind
by only analysing it in one particular time and place. He claimed that
history is for the philosopher what the laboratory is for the scientist
(Brunschvicg, 1923, p. 162): in history the mind can be analysed in its
diverse ways of applying itself to various questions.
Brunschvicg’s belief in the ‘dynamism and plasticity of intellec-
tual functions’ (Brunschvicg, 1922, p. 550) and his neo-Kantian ide-
alism bear consequences for his conception of the physical world. If
the physical world (studied by science) is dependent on the mind,
and the mind is not fixed, then the physical world will also change;
indeed Brunschvicg concluded that ‘nature . . . will never be a gi-
ven’ (ibid., p. 609). In his view, the mind and nature interact and
change as a result of their interaction. He argued that Kant sepa-
rated the mind and the content of experience because he had a
‘static and schematic’ conception of both (ibid., p. 608). However,
the theory of relativity for Brunschvicg had overcome this separa-
tion. As he put it to Einstein in a seminar, in the Kantian world
there is a ‘container’ (space and time) and a content (matter and
force), but in the Einsteinian world, this distinction is no longer va-
lid, for neither space nor time are any longer conceived as ‘empty
and homogeneous’ receptacles of reality (Brunschvicg in Einstein,
1922, p. 100).6 For him, the forms of experience that Kant believed
to be a priori have been shown to be neither fixed nor distinguish-
able from the content of experience.
Brunschvicg’s ‘fluid mind’ is a philosophical version of the more
famous concept of ‘mentality’, which Lucien Lévy-Bruhl had used
and popularised in his books Le fonctions mentales dans les sociétés
inférieures (Lévy-Bruhl, 1910) and La mentalité primitive (Lévy-Bruhl,
1922). The links between the two historians of philosophy were
rather strong: Brunschvicg succeeded Lévy-Bruhl in the Sorbonne
chair of history of modern philosophy, and it seems that Lévy-Bruhl
played a role in the choice of his successor (see Febvre, 1997, p. 271).
Brunschvicg also used Lévy-Bruhl’s work, especially in his own anal-
ysis of ‘pre-historic’ science (Brunschvicg, 1912, Ch. 1; 1922, 1934).
The belief that there are different ways of thinking across time was
very widespread in France in the first half of the twentieth-century,
although in different forms. Brunschvicg and Lévy-Bruhl shared this
view with the historians of mentalities, including Lucien Febvre, and
with numerous historians of science, such as Alexandre Koyré, Abel
Rey and Hélène Metzger-Bruhl. These historians of science investi-
gated past texts and doctrines in order to unveil the mentality which
informed them. By doing this, they often aimed to show that past
doctrines, which may seem absurd from the point of view of modern
science, were internally logical, but followed a different logic and
exhibited different values from modern science. Just to cite an
example from many Metzger described the way of thinking of
seventeenth-century ‘philosophers of metal’ as analogical; in other
words, they saw the world as a network of analogies. As a conse-
quence, from their point of view, it made perfect sense to think that
lead could be transformed into gold, as lead is to gold what a child is
to an adult: in both cases, the former is an imperfect embodiment of
the latter and can develop into its/his perfect form (Metzger, 1969
[1923], p. 108).7
For the philosopher Brunschvicg, the aim was not just to unveil
one particular mentality, but rather to draw general conclusions
about the mind. However, since he shared the historicism of these
other scholars, he could carry out his study of the mind only
through historical research. For him the ‘philosopher’s mission’ is
to follow ‘the indefinite progress of rationality and objectivity, in
their indissoluble link’ (Brunschvicg, 1922, p. 595). In other words,
the Brunschvicgian philosopher studies the history of knowledge,
and observes its ‘progress’ through the ages, which involves
changes in logic, principles, categories and change in what counts
as an object of knowledge.
3. Noumena and Bibliomena : the creativity of human
knowledge
Brunschvicg’s philosophy can be broadly regarded as Bache-
lard’s starting point, as far as his questions, perspective and prior-
ities are concerned. Like Brunschvicg, Bachelard studied the mind

4
Brunschvicg (1922), p. 550. Brunschvicg was by no means the only neo-Kantian philosopher to challenge Kant’s table of categories and their absolute validity. For other
examples, see Köhnke (1991), which however is focused on Germany. On neo-Kantianism in French philosophy of science, see Sinaceur (2006). For Brunschvicg’s specific brand of
neo-Kantianism, see Goyard-Fabre (2005).
5
Bergson had a lengthy polemic with the supporters of the theory of relativity who defended the existence of multiple real times as for instance presented by the physicist Paul
Langevin at the International Congress of Philosophy in 1911, Langevin (1911). Bergson responded in his Durée et Simultanéité (Bergson, 1922), the second edition of which
included three appendices as replies to other physicists, and in particular to Jean Becquerel: see Jacobson (1965) and Dingle (1965). The physicists in turn replied: see, for
example, Metz (1923), pp. 65–75, which contains a section dedicated to Durée et simultanéité, and its Préface by Jean Becquerel (ibid., pp. v–xviii). Bergson addressed Metz’s
objections in ‘Les temps fictifs et le temps réel’ (Bergson, 1972 [1924]). Čapek (1971) has provided a detailed analysis of Bergson’s view of contemporary physics and his polemics
with contemporary physicists.
6
Einstein’s reply must have disappointed Brunschvicg. Considering himself a Kantian, he said that ‘each person has his own Kant’ and he did not know to which Kant
Brunschvicg’s subscribed. He also added that he endorsed Kant’s theory because it showed that in science there are a prioris. He believed that the only alternative is either to
believe that there are innate a prioris as Kant did, or that these are conventional, as Poincaré claimed (Einstein et al., 1922, pp. 101–102).
7
For Metzger’s concept of ‘mental a priori’, which is similar, but not identical, to Lévy-Bruhl’s ‘mentality’, see Metzger (1930, 1936). These and other theoretical articles and
reviews by Metzger have been reprinted in Metzger (1987). On Metzger’s ‘mental a priori’, see also Freudenthal (2006), Chimisso (2001), and for a particularly critical view,
Golinski (1987).
 C. Chimisso / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 39 (2008) 384–392
by observing it ‘at work’, which in practice for him meant to study
the history of natural philosophy, science, philosophy, literature
and also popular beliefs. Bachelard studied scientific knowledge
as a whole; its components—theory and experiment, mathematics
and experimental apparatus, scientists and scientific objects—for
him cannot be understood in isolation, but they have rather to be
analysed in their dialectic relationships. He acknowledged Bruns-
chvicg’s legacy when rejecting the conception of the mind and ob-
ject as absolute and fixed, and subscribing instead to the thesis of
the mutual relativity of the two (Bachelard, 1986 [1949], p. 9). In
Bachelard’s hands, this thesis developed to become one of the dia-
lectics that form the very motor of the evolution of knowledge. The
dialectic between subject and object is for him particularly evident
in science. Indeed, he argued that philosophy of science ‘is . . .
essentially . . . a philosophy of the mutual transformation of man
and things’ (Bachelard, 1951, p. 3). He regarded scientific objects
as the result of a process of transformation—which he often called
‘rectification’ and ‘rationalisation’—operated by human knowledge.
The scientific ‘fact’, he argued, is fictitious, or ‘made up’ (Bachelard,
1970a [1931–1932], p. 12); indeed for him contemporary science is
fictitious (Bachelard, 1951, pp. 3–6).
Bachelard regarded the view that science is about ‘things’ that
exist independently of our knowledge so bizarre, that, instead of
refuting it philosophically, he decided to psychoanalyse those
holding it. He clearly thought that the attachment shown by hu-
man beings to the mind-independent reality of the objects of their
knowledge could only be explained psychologically. For him real-
ism is an innate, instinctive attitude towards the world, which
has more to do with our desires, and in particular desire of posses-
sion, than with any scientific approach. Realism is for him a psy-
chological complex rather than a philosophical position. Realists,
says Bachelard, suffer from the Harpagon complex: they are misers
who want to ‘possess’ the ‘riches of reality’ (Bachelard, 1993
[1938], Ch. 7).8 Realists want to possess substances, that is, what
is permanent in things—what things ‘really’ are, below the surface
of their attributes, of what is transient, and, one could add, of what
is dependent on our perception of them. In La formation de l’esprit sci-
entifique, in which he presents the theory of realism as a psycholog-
ical complex, Bachelard principally relies on the analysis of alchemic
texts. When applied to microphysics, though, his approach gives re-
sults as well. Early atomic models such as J. J. Thomson’s, represent
the atom as ‘containing a large number of smaller bodies’.9 The his-
tory of the atom seems to show what for Bachelard is the journey of
human knowledge: in its first stages it was chosiste (‘thingist’), that is
to say it interpreted its objects as things similar to those ordinarily
perceived in everyday life. However, atomic theory progressively be-
came less akin to anything representable in everyday images, or
even every-day concepts. For those, who, unlike Bachelard, think
that what is familiar counts as more ‘real’ than what contradicts
our everyday experience, it is hard to say that microparticles are
‘real’. It is interesting that Werner Heisenberg, in contesting the idea
that waves in configuration space could be considered ‘real’, argued
that ‘real’ comes from the Latin word res, ‘which means ‘thing’; but
things are in the ordinary three-dimensional space, not in an ab-
stract configuration space’ (Heisenberg, 1958, p. 116). For Bachelard,
this argument would have been an example of chosisme, because it
states that for something to be real it must be a ‘thing’, and a thing
which is similar to those of our everyday experience, in this case, sit-
uated in a three-dimensional space. This attitude for him only leaves
the alternative between ‘traditional realism’ (if scientific objects are
8
Bachelard here refers to Harpagon, the title character of Molière’s The miser. For a study of the evolution of Bachelard’s view of realism, see Pariente (2006).
9
Thomson [1897], quoted in Kragh (1999), pp. 45, my italics.
10
Following the use of the time, Bachelard used the term ‘corpuscle’ as a generic term for subatomic particle. ‘Corpuscle’ was also used to indicate what now is called ‘electron’:
for a history of names of particles, see Kragh (1999), p. 197, Table 13.1.
11
Kant (1998 [1787]), Transcendental Analytic, Book 2, Ch. 3.
387
seen as things in the world) or ‘positivist agnosticism’ (if scientific
objects are not seen as things in the world).
For Bachelard a ‘corpuscle’10 is not ‘a miniature of a common ob-
ject’; it is rather a noumenon (Bachelard, 1951, p. 96). Bachelard’s
use of the term noumenon I believe is partly descriptive and partly
polemical. On the one hand, he simply says that subatomic particles
are not, indeed in principle they cannot be, objects of our senses, or
phenomena. They are rather the product of our nous, of our intellect.
He argues that the fact that particles are thought of mathematically,
‘is the mark of an . . . objective existence’, and concludes with the
‘formula’ cogitatur ergo est: something exists by virtue of being
(mathematically) thought of (Bachelard, 1970a, p. 18). By arguing
this, however, Bachelard goes against the fundamental principles
of Kant’s conception of noumenon. For Kant, the pure concepts of
the intellect can only have an empirical use; in other words, they
can only be applied to experience. For instance, for Kant human
beings apply the concepts of unity and totality to the objects of their
perceptions, but unity and totality cannot be the direct object of hu-
man knowledge: they are the form of our thought, rather than its
content. The content of human knowledge is given by our senses,
in other words, we know phenomena. However, Kant argues, the
very fact that we denote certain objects as phenomena, implies a dis-
tinction between our perception of things and things in themselves.
In other words, things-in-themselves, and in general whatever is not
the object of our senses, are simply thought of by the intellect, they
are noumena. However, in the Critique of pure reason, Kant denied
that noumena can be objects of our knowledge: they are rather neg-
ative concepts, in the sense that they indicate the limits of our intel-
lect, or what our intellect cannot know.11
Electrons cannot be perceived by our senses, but this for Bach-
elard does not make them less real, or less important objects of sci-
entific knowledge. For him, they certainly are more rational than
the objects that we easily perceive. For instance we can see and feel
fire. However, he argued that fire is no longer an object of chemical
knowledge (Bachelard, 1949 [1938], Ch. 5), no matter how clearly
we perceive it. Indeed, for Bachelard, we do not experience fire (or
any other object) ‘directly’, despite what we might believe; in fact,
we load the experience we have of it with our desires, in particular
sexual desires, and thoughts of destruction, death and renewal
(Bachelard, 1949 [1938]). For Bachelard all human knowledge or
opinion carries ‘the human mark’, but this human mark can be pro-
vided either by imagination and subjectivity, as in the case of fire,
or by rationality, as in the case of scientific objects. However, the
form of our rationality cannot be decided once and for all, as Kant
intended. Indeed, for Bachelard the ‘form’ envisaged by Kant was
only the analysis of scientific knowledge as it was in a particular
historical moment. Scientific knowledge has changed, and so, for
Bachelard, should philosophy.
As seen above, Brunschvicg, despite presenting himself as a
Kantian, already challenged the distinction between form and con-
tent of human knowledge, and thought that modern physics had
exploded this distinction. Bachelard fully accepted the rejection
of this distinction, which he placed at the core of his epistemology.
His own reading of history of science fully confirmed it. For him the
objects of human knowledge are not given once and for all, but
rather they are constructed in ways that change in time, as demon-
strated by the difference between the objects of early twentieth-
century physics and those of Newtonian physics. Scientific objects
are for him constructions of historically-situated knowledge. As a
result of his view, he had no qualms in asserting that the electron
388 C. Chimisso / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 39 (2008) 384–392
has a firmer existence than the moon. His proof of this is that more
books have been written about the electrons than about the moon:
the electron, he argued with some humour, is a bibliomenon, it ex-
ists in books; and he adds that this type of existence is ‘so human,
so solidly human!’ (Bachelard, 1951, pp. 6–7). For him, truth does
not result from finding out how things are independently of the
mind; such an aim would be for him a pointless and irrational pur-
suit; indeed a matter for psychoanalysis.
4. If they are not things, then what are they? The ontology of
microphysics
Bachelard thought that modern physics had eliminated the
philosophical distinctions not only between ‘form’ and ‘content’
of knowledge, but also between subject and object, and between
substance and attributes. Corpuscles are for Bachelard the best
illustration of the power of physical knowledge to shake philo-
sophical concepts and categories. He argued that the atom has a
‘new ontological status’ (Bachelard, 1951, p. 76), and he listed
and discussed the characteristics that make corpuscles irreconcil-
able with traditional philosophical ontology. Not only are they
not bodies, but they cannot be described as substances. First of
all, Bachelard explained that corpuscles do not have assignable
absolute dimensions, or shape. He quoted the physicist and math-
ematician Hermann Weyl who wrote that the dimensions attrib-
uted to the electron radium should be interpreted as ‘the
distance at which two electrons get closer to each other with a
speed comparable to the speed of light’ (ibid., p. 77). The corpuscle,
Bachelard concluded, is defined as ‘a power of opposition’; in other
words the corpuscle is investigated through relations rather than
its own essence. With his usual humour, elsewhere Bachelard
wrote that in microphysics ‘in the beginning is the Relation’ (Bach-
elard, 1970a, p. 19). He provided other reasons why corpuscles
cannot be substances in the traditional sense. Their individuality
is not stable; two corpuscles that go through a narrow region
may not be distinguishable (Bachelard, 1951, p. 81); corpuscles, fi-
nally, can be annihilated. Bachelard summarised his view by saying
that in ‘contemporary corpuscular philosophy’ an ‘ontology of cor-
puscles’ is combined with an ‘ontology of corpuscular transforma-
tion’, and referred to a page of Heisenberg’s Two lectures (ibid., p.
83). This is the page where Heisenberg claims that:
the experiments prove directly that there are transitions
between nucleons and mesons . . . mesons, electrons and neutri-
nos; protons, electrons and light quanta, etc. Therefore one can
go from any particle to any other particle at least by intermedi-
ate steps, and it is thereby very probable that in a collision pro-
cess of sufficiently large energy particles of any type can be
created. (Heisenberg, 1949, p. 13)
This possibility of annihilation, and of transformation of one
particle into another, for Bachelard represents the defeat of cho-
sisme (or ‘thingism’) (Bachelard, 1951, p. 82): corpuscles have
nothing to do with the ‘things’ of our everyday experience. A fur-
ther blow to chosisme, and indeed to philosophical ontology and
epistemology, is for him the very specific sense in which it can
be said that corpuscles are in a certain point in space. When we
say that something (material) exists, we imply that it exists in a
specific place (at one given time). It is certainly the case that we
perceive things in space. Kant expressed it very clearly by saying
that space, with time, is the a priori of sensation: we cannot per-
ceive anything if not in space. However, it is not the case that par-
ticles, although not perceivable by our senses, can still be regarded
12
In his paper ‘Wave mechanics and its interpretations’ (1926), de Broglie still expressed reservations about the complementarity solution proposed by Bohr and Heisenberg.
However, in the 1930s he added a footnote at the end of the article explaining that Bohr and Heisenberg’s interpretation of the ‘new mechanics’ had been ‘practically universally
adopted by theoretical physicists’: de Broglie (1939 [1937]), p. 190. He discussed their interpretation in Part 5 of the same book.
as occupying a space in the same way as the other objects of our
experience do. The localisation of subatomic particles presents all
sorts of constraints that make it very problematic to imagine them
being situated in space just as a chair or a table would. These dif-
ficulties lead Heisenberg to argue that it is not possible to talk
about the position of an electron independently of the specific
experiments used to determine it. In his own words:
if one wants to be clear about what is to be understood by the
words ’position of the object’ for example the electron . . . then
one must specify definite experiments with whose help one
plans to measure the ’position of the electron’; otherwise this
word has no meaning. (Heisenberg, 1983 [1927], p. 64)
Such restrictions did not lead Bachelard to become sceptical
about the objective value of the results microphysics, but rather
to argue in favour of a revision of the idea of existence as situated
in space. He claimed that:
the localisation of the corpuscle . . . is dependent on such
restrictions that the function of the situated existence no longer
has an absolute value’. (Bachelard, 1951, p. 80)
It is easy to see how Bachelard’s presentation of sub-atomic par-
ticles is inconsistent with the traditional philosophical concept of
substance. It is not possible to indicate what the unchangeable
structure of a corpuscle’s being is, as we should according to Aris-
totle’s sense of substance. Similarly, it would be difficult to say of a
particle what Descartes said of substance, that is to say that it is ‘a
thing that exists in such a way as to depend on no other thing for
its existence’ (Descartes, 1985 [1644], Pt. I, p. 51). Moreover, the
traditional philosophical distinction, of Aristotelian derivation, be-
tween substance and attributes no longer holds. Bachelard pointed
out that we must not regard the electron as a small body which is
negatively charged, as we would following classical physics,
whereby distinguishing between the electron as substance, and
its charge as attribute, in the same way that we would say that a
man is tall. For him, electrons and protons exhibit a ‘total synthesis
of substance and attribute’ (Bachelard, 1951, p. 77).
In summary, the difficulties that subatomic particles create for
philosophical ontology are so great that it is not really possible
for traditional Cartesian–Kantian philosophy to answer questions
such as ‘what is an electron?’. The duality of representation of sub-
atomic particles as waves and as corpuscles is perhaps the most
striking example of the inability to answer the question of what
the ‘essence’ of a particle is. Bachelard followed in particular the
works of Louis de Broglie and Werner Heisenberg on this problem,
and, as did de Broglie after 1928,12 he accepted Bohr’s thesis of com-
plementarity. In other words, Bachelard did not see anything pecu-
liar about describing the same phenomena as wave and as
corpuscle, that is to say in two different ways which are incompati-
ble with each other. His conclusion is that we must accept that the
concept of substance is irrational, and in general that ‘old’ philosoph-
ical doctrines that cannot be reconciled with the new achievements
of microphysics should be abandoned. It is clear that for Bachelard it
is science that dictates what is rational. If modern science is incom-
patible, as it is, with some long-held philosophical beliefs, for him
there is no doubt: philosophy should rethink its own concepts in
the light of the latest development of science.
Bachelard’s epistemology is normative: it is aimed to judge
what counts as rational knowledge and what does not. This is
why he could write books explaining why alchemy could not pos-
sibly be rational knowledge: because he applied a norm to all
investigations of nature, and this norm was current science.
 C. Chimisso / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 39 (2008) 384–392
Alchemy, just as any inquiry prior to the beginning of the nine-
teenth century, for him fell short of the parameters of rationality
posed by current science. This norm of rationality, however, is
not given once and for all; it changes with the development of sci-
ence itself, and with the contextual change of minds and objects.
This is why Bachelard criticised philosophers for relying, in his
eyes, on concepts that belonged to a previous scientific era.13 How-
ever, not only philosophers, but also scientists were not as ready as
Bachelard to accept the philosophical implications of quantum
mechanics. Without going into a detailed discussion of the different
points of view held by the leading physicists of the time, it is worth
mentioning that some of their positions could broadly fall into the
positions that Bachelard described as superseded by modern physics.
A good example of this is Einstein. I have mentioned above that
Brunschvicg told Einstein that his theory of relativity had gone be-
yond the oppositions of Kantian philosophy, but that Einstein did
not really accept to have revolutionized philosophy, and vaguely
reasserted his Kantian epistemology. Analogously, Bachelard
thought that contemporary physics underpinned the negation of
the classical Cartesian opposition between an unchangeable subject
and an unchangeable object. Of course this does not mean that
Einstein should see it that way. He started his essay Maxwell’s influ-
ence on the evolution of the idea of physical reality with the statement
that: ‘the belief in an external world independent of the perceiving
subject is the basis of all natural sciences’ (Einstein, quoted in
Holton, 1973, p. 241). In their famous paper on the (in)completeness
of quantum mechanics, Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky and Nathan
Rosen stressed once again their fundamentally realist epistemology
based on a distinction between subject and object:
If, without in any way disturbing a system, we can predict with
certainty (i.e., with probability equal to unity) the value of a
physical quantity, then there exists an element of physical real-
ity corresponding to this physical quantity. (Einstein et al., 1983
[1935], p. 138)
For Bachelard, as for the philosophical tradition to which he be-
longed, truth was not a matter of correspondence between the
intellect and the world, or between our theories and physical real-
ity. The existence of subatomic particles, or any other object, inde-
pendently of the mind was not a question which interested him or
that indeed made any sense in his approach. However, his rejection
of what he calls ‘traditional philosophical realism’ did not translate
for him into ‘positivist agnosticism’: he really believed that what
science achieved was the truth—though what counted as true did
change in history—and not just truth about ‘phenomena’. For him,
no agnostic suspension of judgement on how the world ‘really is’
is necessary, nor it makes sense in his philosophy. As to why sci-
ence rather than another form of inquiry or human endeavour
should have been singled out as having this very special status is
something that Bachelard cannot resolve by saying that it provides
a true description of the world. I will discuss this crucial point in
the concluding part of this article. Now a few words must be spent
on how modern physics for Bachelard has realized that quantum
leap from a phenomenological to a phenomenotechnical approach.
5. From phenomenology to phenomenotechnique
In the 1980s the philosophers Ian Hacking and Bas van Fraassen
engaged in a discussion as to whether we ‘really’ see through a
13
He especially targeted Emile Meyerson and Henri Bergson. His La dialectique de la durée is an attack on Bergson’s concept of durée, and Chapter 3, ‘Durée et causalité physique’
is focused on the incompatibility of the Bergsonian concept with modern science. See also Bachelard (1972 [1953]), p. 14, and, on Meyerson, Bachelard (1951), pp. 82–83. He also
judged Jean-Paul Sartre’s grasp of some scientific concepts as based on nineteenth-century science: Bachelard (1951), p. 92. For Meyerson’s view of relativity and quantum
mechanics, see Meyerson (1925); Einstein’s view of it, Einstein (1928); LaLumia (1966), Ch. 5; Fruteau de Laclos (2004), Ch. 4; Zahar (1987).
14
Some critics, however, have read Bachelard’s philosophy as close to Hacking’s realism as expressed in Representing and intervening: see Tijiattas (1991). Dan McArthur (2002)
has criticized her view. I am rather sceptical about the attempts to seek in Bachelard’s philosophy answers to questions that belong to Anglo-American philosophy of science.
389
microscope. In brief, the former has claimed that we do, and the lat-
ter that we do not (Hacking, 1985; van Fraassen, 1985). Van Fraassen
has represented the empiricist point of view: for him, the human
body, or rather its senses, are the measure of all things. He has
therefore argued that we do see through a telescope, because, at
least in principle, we could go and observe, say, the moons of Jupiter
(van Fraassen, 1980, pp. 13–19). By contrast, since our unaided
senses cannot see in principle what we ‘see’ with the help of an
electronic or acoustic microscope, he has concluded that we cannot
say that we see through these devices. For him, to put it roughly, if
we cannot observe something, we have no basis to believe in its
existence. Hacking, on the other hand, has argued that we do have
reasons to believe in the existence of the so-called theoretical enti-
ties (which include Bachelard’s corpuscles) because we can manip-
ulate them. As the subtitle of his Representing and intervening
suggests: ‘if you can spray them, then they are real’ (Hacking, 1983).
This debate gives us the measure of how different Bachelard’s
chosen philosophical background and its values were from those
of large part of recent English-language philosophy of science.
For Bachelard, an object does not gain any special status by virtue
of being observable: scientific objects for him are not the objects of
our perception. As I mentioned above, he thought that the objects
of our untrained perceptions are loaded with our fantasies and
desires. For instance, he investigated the imagery associated with
water in its different forms, as fresh water and sea water, as
streams, ponds and lakes. Our diverse experience of water for
him cannot really be dissociated from ideas and images of purity,
motherhood or death (Bachelard, 1942). Indeed, in his view, scien-
tific knowledge must overcome the obstacles posed to the rational-
isation of nature by the rich imagery that populates our experience
of the world. To see or not to see through a microscope is not really
the problem. But the difference between the questions that Bache-
lard on the one hand and van Fraassen and Hacking on the other
pose is more profound than this. Bachelard, as we shall see,
attached great importance to the human ability of manipulating
objects. This may seem rather close to Hacking’s stance in Repre-
senting and intervening. However, it is not.14 The whole debate be-
tween van Fraassen and Hacking is based on the question of what
warrants our belief in the existence of something that we cannot ob-
serve. In other words, their respective arguments are based on an
opposition between subject and object. As a consequence, the ques-
tion of the mind-independent existence of sub-atomic particles is re-
garded as an important one, while it is just not one of Bachelard’s
philosophical questions. His aim is rather to observe how scientific
knowledge, theories and instruments are created by historically sit-
uated research. For Bachelard, to say that a scientific object exists
independently of science would have been meaningless, for scientific
objects are created by science.
On one point, however, Bachelard would have agreed with
Hacking: the modern scientist does not observe the world, but
rather manipulates it. Bachelard argued that science is not a phe-
nomenology of the world. By phenomenology, Bachelard loosely
intended a doctrine aimed at knowing the ‘external world’ by priv-
ileging what is ‘felt, perceived, indeed imagined’ (Bachelard, 1951,
p. 2). Bachelard’s theory of knowledge, based on his interpretation
of modern physics, counters what normally are considered to be
the fundamental characteristics of phenomenology, such as its
aim at description and its lack of presuppositions. For Bachelard,
in modern science it is impossible to bracket presuppositions and
390 C. Chimisso / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 39 (2008) 384–392
previous knowledge; in fact for him scientific knowledge develops
by revisiting, opposing and rectifying previous knowledge, and by
overcoming irrational beliefs. Without previous knowledge and
irrational beliefs for Bachelard there would be no knowledge at
all. This is why he claimed that modern science’s rationalism never
begins, but always re-starts, ‘rectifies’, ‘regularises’ and ‘normalis-
es’ previous conceptions (cf. Bachelard, 1986 [1949], pp. 112,
122–123). Knowledge always springs out of a dialectic engagement
with its past. For Bachelard, only errors are immediate, and they
must be revised and rectified rationally.
Bachelard directly criticised Edmund Husserl, the founder of
phenomenology as a philosophical doctrine, for conceiving of
knowledge as ‘reception’ of ‘data’ by the mind. He commented that
Husserl’s ‘dualism’ between mind and data is not ‘close enough’ or
‘systematic enough’ (Bachelard, 1986 [1949], p. 43). In other words,
it is not dialectic, as there is no mutual intervention of the two ele-
ments, which do not change each other. For Bachelard, the mind
does not ‘receive’ the object, but rather judges it and makes it ra-
tional. What, however, for Bachelard really distinguishes modern
science from phenomenology, is that scientists do not simply ob-
serve or directly capture essences, but rather technically manipulate
and indeed create the objects of their knowledge. Bachelard pointed
out that the only possible study of corpuscles is technical, that is to
say it is carried out by using experimental apparatus; in his own
words, ‘of all corpuscles of modern physics, one can only do a phe-
nomenotechnical study’ (Bachelard, 1951, p. 92). He continued by
saying that in phenomenotechnique, no phenomenon appears natu-
rally, no phenomenon is a given.15 I have mentioned above that Bach-
elard called corpuscles noumena and even bibliomena. Here we see
how Bachelard stressed the technical character of these objects; in
modern physics, he argued, ‘ontology [is] conditioned by technical
experience’ (Bachelard, 1951, p. 82). Indeed, for him a concept be-
comes scientific insofar as it becomes technical (Bachelard, 1993
[1938], p. 61). The structure of nature itself has a human and techni-
cal character: Bachelard argued that the ‘true order’ of nature is that
which we technically put into nature itself (Bachelard, 1991 [1934],
p. 111). Modern physics, and quantum mechanics in particular, here
inspire and support Bachelard’s view that experimentation has noth-
ing to do with the direct observation of nature: the concepts itself of
observation, he pointed out, is thrown into doubt in certain domains
of quantum mechanics (Bachelard, 1986 [1949], p. 43). In quantum
mechanics, the measuring apparatus inevitably interferes with the
system, as Niels Bohr explained on several occasions, for instance
by saying that ‘the procedure of measurements has an essential influ-
ence on the conditions on which the very definition of the physical
quantities in question rests’ (Bohr, 1983 [1935], p. 144). This inextri-
cability of apparatus and object was easy to accept for Bachelard pre-
cisely because he thought that the scientific object could not be
independent of our knowledge (theoretical or technical) and could
not be grasped as it is ‘in itself’. The impossibility of drawing a clear
line between object and apparatus comes therefore as an extension of
the thesis that no sharp distinction can be drawn between the subject
and the object of knowledge.
For Bachelard, modern physics shows that even an intervention
on nature that is not informed by theoretical and technical knowl-
edge is a dream of the past. This is why he described experimenta-
tion in modern science as ‘non-Baconian’ (Bachelard, 1970b, p. 45).
It is only thanks to the apparatus that the objects of scientific the-
ories come into being, so to speak; Bachelard claimed that the phe-
nomena of contemporary scientific thought are phenomena of
apparatus, created by the apparatus (Bachelard, 1951, p. 5). His
stress on the technical side of science and the role of experimenta-
15
See these insightful discussions of Bachelard’s concept of phenomenotechnique: Rheinberger (2005); Castelão-Lawless (1995).
16
He employed psychoanalysis mainly in his 1930s books (Bachelard, 1949 [1938], 1993 [1938]) but in the 1950s he had not changed his mind: he still wrote that within
scientific culture, a question which does not leave the individual sphere is a matter of psychoanalysis: Bachelard (1951), p. 4.
tion was an important development that made his philosophy dif-
ferent in character from Brunschvicg’s idealism. In Bachelard’s
philosophy, the distinction between thinking and doing is elimi-
nated: one cannot ‘observe’ nature without thinking and without
theories, but one cannot have scientific theories and scientific ob-
jects without experimentation. For Bachelard, instruments are part
of scientific knowledge just as theories, scientific objects and
minds are. All these components are dependent on one another:
there would be no scientific objects without theories or without
instruments, without theorists or without technicians.
6. Why should philosophy follow science?
Bachelard thought that twentieth-century physics had revolu-
tionized not only science but also philosophy. Indeed, he believed
that science should revolutionize philosophy: his criticism of some
philosophers for being still attached to nineteenth-century thinking
implies that philosophy was lagging behind. But why should philos-
ophy follow science? Or, in other words, what makes science pref-
erable to other types of investigation? It should be clear from what I
said so far, that Bachelard would not have answered these ques-
tions by saying that science is preferable because it provides a true
picture of the world as it is independently of us. Scientific knowl-
edge is for Bachelard the result of the dialectic interaction of minds,
objects, theories and apparatus. But one can easily argue that so
was alchemic knowledge. The objects of alchemy may be heavily
shaped by a specific world-view, but so are the objects of science.
However for Bachelard there is a crucial difference between the
way in which science and alchemy order their worlds: science em-
ploys rationality, while alchemy employed imagination and emo-
tions. There is no doubt that for Bachelard rationality is superior
to imagination, although it is so only in the social context. He
wrote many books analysing and indeed celebrating imagination,
but always in the private sphere, and he always thought the ‘diur-
nal and nocturnal man’, that is rational and oneiric life, should be
kept separate (see for example, (Bachelard (1972b [1953]),
p. 19 ). Rationality for him should regulate society, while imagina-
tion should enrich our private life. He commented that the alche-
mist ‘cannot communicate his dreams’. By contrast, scientific
knowledge not only can be communicated, but for him it is always
created socially, through the interaction between individuals, as
well as between minds and objects, and between new knowledge
and old knowledge. Modern science for Bachelard is not the ‘archi-
tectonic knowledge’ of philosophers, who believed that knowledge
could be built little by little starting from its foundations. Scientific
knowledge for him is ‘polemical’: it results from clashes between
different views, and between present results and past failures
(Bachelard, 1950 [1936]; 1986 [1949], pp. 68 ff.). He regarded sci-
ence as objective, but objective for him means intersubjective and
social, rather than belonging to the object as opposed to the sub-
ject. Rather than the individualistic Cartesian cogito, Bachelard’s
rationalism is based, in his expression, on the cogitamus, that is
to say collective and dialectic thinking (Bachelard, 1986 [1949],
pp. 56, 59–60). On the other hand, he pathologized what he called
pre-scientific thought—that is any inquiry prior to the nineteenth
century—and employed psychoanalysis in order to understand
the roots of its ‘mentality’.16 For him the capital sin of ‘pre-scientific’
thought is that of applying to the social sphere what it should stay
private: emotions, desires and images.
It is, however, almost a tautology to say that for Bachelard sci-
ence is the model of knowledge because it is rational, for the norm
 C. Chimisso / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 39 (2008) 384–392
of rationality for him is provided by current science. In other
words, for him, it is science that dictates what counts as rational.
The reasons why Bachelard had to assign such an important role
to science are, I think, of two orders. The first is simply historical.
Bachelard’s epistemology is historical, and results from the obser-
vation of the historical forms that knowledge has taken. In other
words, for him humankind, in its history, has exercised rationality
through science, and the role of epistemologists is to analyse these
forms, by taking as their norm the historically most advanced form.
The other reasons why Bachelard valued science above any other
type of social activity belong to ethics. I believe that Bachelard re-
garded the overstepping of the boundaries between private and
public life as morally undesirable. In pre-scientific knowledge, the
relationships between people are not acceptable to him, because
they are based on personal authority. This is marked even by the
physical space: the apprentice in the art of alchemy would live in
their master’s home, unlike the student of science who would learn
their trade in public spaces. He denounced the ‘false values’ of ‘inti-
mate thought’, which in his view is ‘lazy’, and exhorted his readers
to get rid of those ‘strange problems’ that ‘laziness’ creates (Bach-
elard, 1951, p. 4).17
The type of rationalism based on modern science, by contrast, is
for him ‘the consciousness of a rectified science, of a science which
bears the mark of human action, of the well-considered, industri-
ous, normalising action’ (Bachelard, 1986 [1949], p. 123; my italics).
Science for Bachelard is the embodiment of change, of work and
action, which he clearly valued more than inaction. He valued
the transformation that the mind undergoes as a result of scientific
work very highly, and believed that a philosophy inspired by scien-
tific practices would have the same effect as science. In scientific
activity, the subject, in his interaction with the object, not only
‘regularises’ the object, but ‘eliminates . . . irregular attitudes from
his own intellectual behaviour’ (Bachelard, 1970b, p. 92). For Bach-
elard science should be chosen because in his view it enables
human beings to overcome their selfish, individualist and emo-
tional drives and to enter a world of objectivity and work. The
history of science for him is a history of progressive socialization,
and science’s aim at objectivity assures that ‘selfishness’ cannot
have a place in it. He thought that the historian of science’s mission
should be to show the ‘profoundly human value of current science’
(Bachelard, 1972a, p. 152). Although the application of science is
one of the central concerns of his philosophy, he never discussed
these applications outside the laboratory, for instance in the two
world wars that took place in his lifetime, and the materialization
of atomic theory in the atomic bomb. His analysis seems to be
rather impermeable to the world outside books and laboratories,
and until the end of his life he believed that science embodied hu-
man values which must be preserved and developed. Moral values
were what made him choose science as guide to philosophy and
social life.
Manuscript sources
Cambridge, MA, Houghton Library, Harvard University, bMS Am
1803
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