 To assert and describe the newness of Qing philosophical thinking about the manifold dimensions of reality in late imperial China is to highlight a sense of departure from the immediate past, that is, to trace the transition from the Song-Ming mode of thinking to the Qing one by pinpointing the disjunction and continuity. In other words, it begs the question of the relationship between late imperial thought and the preceding intellectual traditions. Inquiries into the Ming-Qing intellectual transition have tended to adopt two narrative and analytical strategies: first, the comparative approach that creates paradigms of adjoining intellectual movements and then points out their stark contrasts and vast differences; second, the developmental approach based on the assumption of continuity, governed by notions of tradition, influence, and evolution. The comparative approach that stresses rupture was in fact adopted by the some of the towering late Ming-early Qing intellectual figures, such as Gu Yanwu (1613–82) and Wang Fuzhi (1619–92), who created an archetype of Ming thought and Song-Ming Confucianism as abstract, abstruse, feckless, and feeble, such that they became a monolithic type of thinking represented by finicky metaphysical speculation and passive moral introspection. By Qing times, such a mode of intellection became collectively known as “Song learning” (Songxue), with its overt focus on moral principles (yili zhi xue), as opposed to “Han learning” (Hanxue), scholarship anchored on the deep philological probing of texts and words, and their literal meanings (wenzi xungu). The modern restatement of this position was made by Liang Qichao (1873–1929), a most influential late Qing and Republican intellectual figure, who criticized the futility of Song-Ming thought as “vague”, “intangible”, and “abstract”. Because of the wide circulation and common usage of the English translation by Immanuel Hsu of one of Liang’s book on Qing intellectual history (Liang 1921 [1959]), Liang’s view became for a long time the basic interpretive reference point for the study of late imperial intellectual trends, creating a dominant historiography that interprets the Ming-Qing intellectual transition as a cataclysmic event that ushered in a new spirit of thought. Another giant intellectual figure, a stalwart of the New Culture (or May-Fourth) movement, Hu Shi (1891–1962), held similar views, going so far as to advance the influential thesis of Qing philosophy as scientific and progressive (Hu 1967: 104–131).