The formation of the scientific mind

Browsing through the family library and looking for a book to take with me on vacation, I stumbled upon a book by Gaston Bachelard on the formation of the scientific mind. Here is the exciting first paragraph.

"One who studies the psychological conditions of scientific progress quickly becomes convinced that the problem of scientific knowledge must be posed in terms of obstacles, by which I mean neither external obstacles such as the complexity of phenomena, nor the weakness of the senses and of the human mind; it is in the intimate act of acquiring knowledge that, by some sort of functional necessity, appear troubles and slowdowns. There, we will show some causes of stagnation and even regression. There, we will distinguish some causes of inertia that we will call epistemological obstacles. The knowledge of reality is a light that must always project shadows somewhere. It is never immediate and full. The revelations about reality are always recurrent. Reality is never "what one might believe" but it is always what one should have thought. Empirical thought is clear a posteriori, once the machinery of reasoning has been tuned. It is by going over a past of errors that we can find truth, in a genuine act of intellectual repentance. In fact we acquire knowledge against a prior knowledge, by destructing poorly built knowledge, by moving on beyond what, in our own intellect, is an obstacle to intellectualisation."