 Chinese Marxist scholarship in general likewise endorses this cataclysmic interpretation of the emergence of “progressive” thought in the late imperial period. Such thesis of discontinuity also found echoes in older western scholarship, such as that of the late Joseph Levenson, which contends that it was only in the seventeenth century that voices began to be raised against Song-Ming idealism and subjective idealism (1964). In sum, according to the thesis of rupture between Song-Ming learning and late imperial thought, seventeenth-century scholars begrudged the corruption of learning by indulgent moral introspection and arcane metaphysical speculation. As a result, there emerged the study of practical statecraft for the ordering of the workaday world of institutions and administrations, which realized the time-honored ideal of jingshi zhiyong (ordering the world and extending utility). Moreover, in order to rectify the abuses of the Song-Ming empty talk (kongtan), evidential research (kaozheng or kaoju) arose, especially in the area of philology, otherwise known as Han learning, in contradistinction to Song learning that pursued speculative introspection.