The concept of participation with Lucien Levy-Bruhl

Reading Levy-Bruhl's work through the topic of mental causality, one sees that the concept of participation - borrowed from Malebranche's philosophy - enables him to overpass the opposition between two conceptions : on the one hand, (( natural causality)), borrowed from Tylor and British association-nism, which accounts for magical operations through intellectual mistakes, and on the other hand, << social causality >>, elaborated by Durkheirn and French sociology, which accounts for moral and religious events through the intervention of society as a collective subject. The concept of participation refers to a mode of causality which works on the level of natural experience without adding to it a supernatural and specifically social level : a This analysis can be compared to that of imagination by Bergson, and throws a light on the ambivalent reception of Levy-Bruhl by phenomenology and structuralism.