 The theme of intellectual continuity was also evident in much of Japanese scholarship which generally regards Wang Yangming’s idea of liangzhi (innately spontaneous moral knowing) as a major spiritual resource for fundamental change. It credits the left wing of the Wang Yangming school for further unleashing the potentials of this liberating precept by espousing individualism and voluntarism that signified moral autonomy. Furthermore, it argues that the Qing belief in the possibility of “objective” investigations of the classics should be examined in the context of the “subjectivism” that unified the Song, Yuan, and Ming philosophical views. This scholarship also explores the import of late imperial Chinese thought in terms of the idea of multiple early modernities in world history, to the extent that the late Ming and Qing witnessed the workings of the particular historical dynamics of “early modern” (sen kindai) China, manifested in the new conceptions of self and society that were reformulations of some central leitmotifs and polarities in traditional Confucian thinking (Shimada 1970; Mizoguchi 1980).