The Psychoanalysis of Fire

Bachelard is neither a self-confessed and tortured atheist like Sartre, nor, like Chardin, a heretic combining a belief in God with proficiency in modern science. But, within the French context, he is almost as important as they are, because he has a pseudo-religious force, without taking a stand on religion. to define him briefly, he is a philosopher with a professional training in the sciences, who devoted most of the second phase of his career to promoting that aspect of human nature which often seems most inimical to science: the poetic imagination (J. G. Weightman, The New York Review of Books)