This article deals with the phenomenology of African mind centering on the law of vital force. The article accepts as a premise the thesis that what makes the difference between the European mindset and that of the African people is their collective system of values and beliefs. This system of beliefs and values forms their ontological unity (the unit that gives collective identity) and provides the basis for their logic of reality. The unity is an ontological one, internally organized in such a way that the mental organization derived from it provides a conceptual paradigm in which one premises reality. This ontological unity lays a profound basis for value judgments and informs people’s conception of what is right and wrong, tolerable and intolerable. If this is not disturbed by an epistemological heterogeneity, it may give rise to a homogeneous culture.

This internal organization of reality is expressed in terms of concept, language and the ordinary practices of life. The truth of these hypothesis is attested to by both the naturalistic epistemology of Aristotle and the spiritualistic epistemology of Plato. In Plato’s doctrine of the forms, well elaborated in the theory of the Divided line as pictured in the Allegory of the Cave, reality rests in the world of ideas, a virtual noetic heaven, while sensible phenomena exist only as the image of the reality to which the world of Ideas belongs. Therefore, for Plato, one obtains true knowledge in the world of Ideas, the spiritualistic world.