 Nevertheless, even though Qing intellectualism was an outgrowth of the Confucian tradition with a time-worn pedigree, it was also new in the sense that the kaozheng (evidential research) movement and methodology, the utmost expression of the intellectualist spirit, by virtue of its intellectual scale and density, wrought an epochal breakthrough. It came to be inescapably and unmistakably identified with the special Qing way of construing reality and the world. Kaozheng scholarship opened up hermeneutic issues of interpretation. As Benjamin Elman has pointed out, the classics as a whole were unproblematically recognized as assent-eliciting cultural and textual capital, but once they were subjected to interrogation as individual separate texts, dissent and disquiet arose. The authenticity of some texts came to be questioned; their places in the heterogeneous commentarial came to be debated; their authority came to be reassessed; and the manner of retrieving the antique messages came to be argued. In short, the classics were historicized. Moreover, what began as studies of the classics spilled over into other areas of inquiry—bronze artifacts, pre-Qin thinkers and texts, history, geography, cosmology, science, and so on.