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I assume you are talking?in part about the following quote: “First of all, it was an emotional shock.?I recall one evening of profound revelation.?The identification of God with life itself was an idea that stirred me almost to ecstasy because it now enabled me to see in biology the explanation of all things and the mind itself.?In the second place, it was an intellectual shock.?The problem of knowing (properly called the epistemological problem) suddenly appeared to me in an entirely new perspective and as an absorbing topic of study.?It made me decide to consecrate my life to the biological explanation of knowledge. (Piaget, 1952, p.240)? The late Michael Chapman said much the same as Ed does of Piaget's spiritual immanence in Constructive Evolution.?Immanence is a theology that allows for a divine presence in the workings of the universe itself, and not above it, or transcendental to it.?No supernatural causality is absolutely required.?Piaget apparently wrote something on this in the 1920's but was so roundly criticized by more traditional religious authorities that he thought better of doing it again.?The idea of the relationship between part and whole that underlies his work can be thought of a s a guiding principle, but it need not be transcendentally mystical.?I imagine that someone who sees the Fibbonacci spiral in a pinecone might have a similar feeling of awe. If this is what is involved in Piaget's drawing back from the precipice of atheism, then he is actually being true to his early sources of inspiration while being consistent with his younger self, and with the scientific process, as he saw it. He was probably not a Bergsonian vitalist as an adult, but the biological world never seems to be a vast biochemical dead machine?in his work either.