 Qing philosophy, with vitalism, historicism, utilitarianism and intellectualism as its contextual and thematic patterns of thinking and articulation, heralded a new phase in Chinese intellectual history, interrogating antecedent concepts and ushering in new approaches. I use these “isms” advisedly as terms of art, not technical ones. Vitalism in this context smacks not of the Bergsonian metaphysical postulation of an élan vital, and historicism does not appeal to the ancestral nomenclature of Hegelian dialectics. Utilitarianism appeals not to Bentham’s consequentialist philosophy, and intellectualism elides the Socratic or Thomistic reference to rationality and ratiocination. Vitalism, in the context of Qing thought, is a reference to the Neo-Confucian philosophy of qi, commonly rendered into English as material force or psycho-physical force. It denotes a view of reality that focuses attention in large part to the evidence provided by life grasped from within a body, the self, or external thing. This evidence revealed embodied experience to be composed of concrete tendencies and occurrences not readily reduced to or dissolved in metaphysical speculation or conception, such as the ontological notion of principle (li) or heaven (tian). Historicism describes the mental habit and endeavor to find and establish meaning in history as it was made by human agents, shunning supra-temporal principles and transcendent norms of universal validity, such as the idea of the constant Way (dao), and savoring instead the contingent and particular in varying and changing contexts. Utilitarianism takes its cue from the Confucian activist ideal of “ordering the world by extending utility and function to the fullest” (jingshi zhiyong), privileging the functional component of yong (utility) over ti (the essential substance of things) in the ti-yong polarity that represented the interacting inner and outer realms of reality. Just as it gave priority to outer efforts of acting as opposed to the inner quiddity of being, so it presumed an intimate relation between knowledge and action in the experiential world. Intellectualism is an abstraction from the Confucian external cultivational goal of “following the way of inquiry and learning” (dao wenxue), which placed a premium on discursive knowledge and scholarly pursuit as the means to comprehend the classics, understood as the textual encasement and manifestations of the profound principles of the ancient sages. In time, it bred the critical evidentiary research (kaozheng) that sought to thoroughly reveal the sages’ teachings and messages via philology.