 Meanwhile, important French thinkers had already taken a historical approach, one that explicitly characterizes science as a series of breaks or coupures. The principal genealogy includes Léon Brunschvicg, Gaston Bachelard and his student, Georges Canguilhem, and the latter’s student, Michel Foucault. Neither Kuhn’s historicism nor his talk of revolutionary breaks was news to the French (Gutting, 2001, 2003). The French tradition of science studies, going back to Auguste Comte and including later figures such as Pierre Duhem and Henri Poincaré, possessed a historical dimension that positivism lost after Ernst Mach, as it became logical positivism. However, the French and Germanic traditions have some roots in common. As Gutting points out, Brunschvicg, like Émile Meyerson, was a science-oriented idealist. For him the mind is not a passive wax tablet; rather, it actively forges internal links among ideas, yet it is also often surprised by the resistant exteriority of the natural world. Against traditional metaphysics, philosophy of science should limit itself to what the science of the time allows—but not dogmatically so. For dogmatic attempts to extract timeless principles and limitations (such as Kant’s denial of the possibility of non-Euclidean geometry) may soon be embarrassed by further scientific advances. Einstein’s general theory of relativity exemplifies the revolutionary nature of the most impressive developments.