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I think that is true, Michael's comments (see below), about most scientists being atheists since Darwin's time. Piaget was initially a "believer" as Michael phrased it earlier, during approx his teenage years. His belief in orthodox religion faded through his twenties, and this fading can be traced through the spiritual books and essays published in the 1920s and early 1930s. But the fading was more a transformation from an orthodox religious outlook to the sense in which religion or spirituality is used by today's transpersonal psychologists and transpersonal philosophers. His belief in "immanence" (which meant something roughly like Maslow's "being-values" or "self-transcendence") was present from the start but grew to become the centre piece of the spiritual theory, as the orthodox religious component faded. I didn't mean to give the impression that he remained an orthodox Protestant Christian - this certainly would have been misleading, and I didn't try and argue that in the book and articles. Piaget wrote on spirituality widely until the early 1930s, and promoted his theory of immanence as an alternative to orthodox Christianity, and to the burgeoning interesting in spiritualism of all kinds in the 1920s which became today's "new age" movement. This much is indisputable?- the evidence is there in the French texts for all to see. The reasons he stopped writing about spirituality so prominently might be that he became an atheist. Or they might be that he realised that he was fighting a powerful prevailing current of intellectual opinion, and could not substantiate his spiritual theory with the rigor of his psychological theory. As Piaget made no definite statement on the issue, indeed avoided making one, we don't know for sure. But when he did speak and write about religion in later adulthood there seems to be evidence that he still had sympathies for spirituality - as long as that spirituality is defined in in a rational manner in line with "immanence" and not in a super-scientifc or supernatural manner. Since about 1979 in transpersonal psychology the distinction has been described as that between "pre-rational spirituality" (magic, astrology, superstition, angels, demons, etc) and "trans-rational spirituality" (spirituality as investigated by Maslow, Kohlberg, Fowler, Hunt, Loevinger, Sinnott, etc - a sense of transcending the individual self through through achieving an outstanding level of moral and affective development in particular.) Piaget's more mature spiritual work was of the latter kind, in line with today's transpersonalists. Einstein incidently (who Michael mentions) is another one who, although an atheist, wrote about similar transpersonal experiences to Piaget - moments of intense synthesis and integration which inspired description in "spiritual" language. Again, people like to cut this out his work, but, like Piaget, its there in his autobiographical writings. if you dig deep. Einstein called it "cosmic religious feeling". The passages are collected in T. Pais. Subtle is the Lord: The science and life of Albert Einstein (Oxford University Press, 1982). Many other physicists had similar views, and I describe these in the book too. So i think that while scientists have generally moved away from orthodox religion, some of them fashioned a middle ground between science and supernaturalism, which is what transpersonal psychology is all about. And I think there is a case for including Piaget in that number. Certainly in the first half of his life, and possibly in the second half as well. My aim with the book was to cause some debate about this, and I'm pleased people are taking the time to reply to me. I continue to respect all of your views, and to challenge my own views, to see where they are wrong, or in need of tightening up.