I am alone so I dream of the being who has cured my solitude, who would be cured by solitudes. With its life, it brought me the idealizations of life, all the idealizations which give life a double, which lead life toward it summits, which make the dreamer too live by splitting...

(Le nouvel esprit scientifique)
Dialectic of Duration. He compared "scientific knowledge" to ordinary knowledge in the way we deal with it and saw error as only illusion: "Scientifically we think the truth as the historical rectification of a long error and we think experience as the rectification of the common and original illusion (illusion première). The role of epistemology in science
Bachelard was a rationalist in the Cartesian sense although he recommended his "non-Cartesian epistemology" as a replacement for the more standard Cartesian epistemology.

He rose to some of the most prestigious positions in the Académie française and influenced many subsequent French philosophers among them Michel Foucault Louis Althusser Dominique Lecourt and Jacques Derrida. To the latter he introduced the concepts of epistemological obstacle and epistemological break (obstacle épistémologique et rupture épistémologique).