 Known in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the West through the work of Jesuits in China, Zhu Xi’s thought and texts were made more widely available to western scholarship in the late nineteenth century. Notably, James Legge (1815–1897) based his translations of the Chinese Classics on Zhu Xi’s commentaries, which he quoted and discussed at length in his footnotes to the texts. Early in the twentieth century, a Chinese student of John Dewey (1859–1951) at Cornell, Hu Shi (1891–1962), initially followed the empirical, textual Qing scholars in viewing Zhu as a scholastic metaphysician. But, after reading Zhu’s Dialogues for himself in old age, Hu contended that Zhu’s method of observation was not scholastic but essentially scientific in nature. J.P. Bruce, who translated a book of Zhu’s collected writings in the 1920s, viewed Zhu’s notion of li (pattern; principle) in light of Stoic natural law. From the 1930s, the eminent historian of Chinese philosophy, Feng Youlan, interpreted li along the lines of platonic Forms making Zhu Xi appear to be an idealist and abstract thinker. In the 1950s, Carsun Chang naturalized the notion of li by aligning it with the Aristotelian “nature” or “essence”, thereby locking Zhu’s thought into a sort of rigid descriptive metaphysics.