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Thanks for the email. Les: I will have to read your essay in the Cambridge Companion to Piaget again as I don't recall what it said. But a few points occurred to me so far on reading your email: Its not a straight forward question of whether Piaget was (1) religious, or (2) not religious. He was religious in his teens, he departed from orthodox religion soon after. But he was certainly not done thinking about religious and spiritual matters, as we know from the books and essays he published on religion through religious studies publishing houses and in theological journals. So he took a middle ground between (1) and (2) which we can call (3). So the question is what was the nature of (3) for Piaget? This third possibility, or middle ground between (1) and (2), involved a view of the spiritual as something immanent in biology, which found fullest expression in the human mind, through moral action in relation to conscience, and through the scientific quest to know the universe. Hence immanence came to fruition through human development, rather like Maslow's "B-values" and "self-transcendence." These two strands of Piaget's spirituality were related because both scientific reasoning and moral reason passed through the same broad stages from concrete operations to formal operations. Hence, Piaget set out to investigate psychology in order to see whether the emergence of spiritual value in the life was normative, by his own admission in Recherche. Even in the Moral Judgment, he considered autonomous morality to be a form of "spiritual reality" and one to be contrasted with the autocratic morality imposed on children by rules in school on adults by laws (particularly in theocratic societies.) Hence modern Western society was a higher spiritual reality than pre-modern society, as it allowed greater autonomy in individual's decisions. A view very in keeping with current work in transpersonal theory. The role of some of the essays in Sociological Studies was, I believe, to relocate the source of morality from religious texts to human conscience, and to provide a theory of the sociology of how this happens. This was quite in line with Piaget's immanent spirituality, which unfolded through moral decisions and scientific investigation. (Morality and science were both forms of logic: morality the logic of actions on people, science the logic of actions on objects - the two strands of his spirituality were related.) Although these essays aren't classic spiritual Piaget, they do play the role of explaining the genesis of morals without recourse to religion in sociological terms, which was central to his exploration of immanence.?(If he uses the word transpersonal in this context, it means something like interpersonal - I agree on that, and with the earlier comments by yourself and others. I never claimed this was not the case.) Regarding scientific knowledge. Piaget's middle ground between science and religion, his expression of immanence in his life, was achieved through the quest for scientific knowledge. This was the conclusion that Piaget came to following his spiritual crisis in Recherche, in which he moved from a Christian stance to a transpersonalist stance. Hence, when he cryptically tells Bringuier in the interviews, "I still believe immanence," we have to follow this up - which is what I have done. Piaget did discuss non-scientific knowledge (or non representaional knowledge), which he called the "figurative pole". And he and Inhelder expressed regret at not having studied this form of knowing more in Mental Imagery. But it is quite possible to hold that Piaget believed that scientific knowledge was the only knowledge, and still find it congruent with his immanent spirituality: Immanence unfolded through scientific investigation, and the service carried out therein. Piaget and Hegel. I think we are left with a similar dual interpretation of Piaget as exists with Hegel. Hegel wrote only one set of books: he has both thoroughly spiritual interpretations and thoroughly atheistic Marxist interpretations. These depend on whether the rational act of reflective self-consciousness is considered spiritual or not. Its a question open to interpretation. (And in fact it relates well to Piaget's expression of immanence through the scientific quest.) Indeed, in Piaget's last works, e.g. Possibility and Necessity, there were still explicit, though short, discussions of the universe's ("Reality's") quest to know itself through evolution in Hegelian manner, and in a manner that has become very influential in today's evolutionary transpersonal theory. (One of the flaws in Chapman's approach, for me, was that he didn't highlight these later passages enough.) With regard to why he didnt invesitgate transpersonal experience more thoroughly: the original article that started all this, Spiritual consciousness in the age of quantity: The strange case of Jean Piaget's mysticism was precisely an answer to that question. I don't have much to add to this at present, except for Brian's insight that it might have been the response of theologians rather than scientists to his immanence theory that actually put him off talking about spirituality publically! But I'll let you know if anything else occurs. Completing Piaget's Project. The title I gave to the book (the publisher's choice in the end, not mine) implied that Piaget's spiritual work was incomplete. To be sure he focused much less on spirituality in his later career than his earlier. The point I make is that transpersonal psychology can complete Piaget's original project as outlined in Recherche, and as he failed to complete in later life. One question then is whether developmental psychologist's in Piaget's tradition should be considering spiritual matters as a part of their investigation? And familiarising ourselves with what Piaget said on spirituality in his early career, and with what he said, and didn't say, (and what he refused to retract), later in his career, is a part of forming our personal answer to that question. I continue to learn a lot from all of your emails, both about Piaget. and about prevailing attitudes to science and religion,