 The question arises whether these sets of categories and associations were more a help or a hindrance to the development of science in traditional China. On the one hand, their loose criteria and arbitrary design allowed for easy classifications and “accounts” of phenomena that would have stymied serious scientific investigation while, on the other, the associations thus attributed to these phenomena sometimes might have yielded expectations or hypotheses of sorts, thus stimulating further inquiry. Interestingly, Zhu often sidestepped these sets of categories altogether in his serious thinking about natural phenomena and judged them by what he took to be the deciding factors in the cases themselves, often in light of analogies. Striking cases of this are Zhu’s discussions on the structure of the cosmos (heaven and earth) and insightful explanations of phases of the moon and eclipses of the sun and moon. For example, Zhu often said that the earth was floating on water; both below the earth and surrounding its four sides were water, but he also said that qi surrounded the earth. And, he also spoke of vortices, centrifugal forces, and occasionally of the earth’s motion. Zhu was interested in these accounts of the formation of the world, but saw no way to confirm any of them. He perhaps thought it was important to present such accounts as representative of an objective approach to a question that was more amenable to mystical or religious approaches.