The Notebooks on Primitive Mentality

This is the English translation by Lilian A. Clare of Lévy-Bruhl’s 1922 “La mentalité primitive”. Lévy-Bruhl’s 1910 “Les fonctions mentales dans les sociétés inférieures” is also translated by Clare, as "How Natives Think". In the preface, Lévy-Bruhl writes, “ 'Mental Functions' (How Natives Think) laid special stress upon the law of participation, considered in relation to the principle of identity, and also upon the fact that the primitive has but slight perception of the law of contradiction. The object of 'Primitive Mentality' rather is to show what causation means to primitives, and the inferences derived from their idea of it.”