In 1978, Racine and Bailly brought out a fundamental issue in human geography, discipline which has never really exceeded the level of true empirical exploration. In short, human geography is a discipline which, despite all good intention, is not scientific. Why does such a situation exist? Can we identify and understand, at an epistemological level, the mental blockage in the evolution of the thinking behind the theory of human geography? As an hypothesis, it is stated that human geography is, by its very origin, caught with what we shall call its « referential myth ». The latter prevents it, on the epistemological plane, from breaking through thehermeneutical circle of its interpretive thinking. This break is an essential characteristic which came with the 17th century's scientific thinking. The history of this breakthrough is referred to with a description of three typical cognitive structures (pure pre-scientific, Cartesian pre-scientific and Newtonian scientific). These three structures provide a frame of reference through which an attempt is made to link together the cognitive attitudes of the important currents of geographic thought (determinism, the French school of geography, and the quantitative approach). How and why the scientific attitude in human geography was more a case of wishful thinking than of reality is thus underlined. Finally, if despite our being two centuries behind, we begin to understand the scientist attitude, we shall see where the danger lies in considering this last concept as the only possible solution for the reconstruction of our discipline.