 A protuberant ideational strand that made up the Qing philosophical universe was the affirmative outlook regarding discursive knowledge and intellectual pursuit of the dao as the Way of the exterior world, supplanting the introspective endeavor and spiritual contemplation aimed at internal enlightenment and realization. A word here about the socio-political context of this shift is necessary. The intellectualist reorientation that characterized the Ming-Qing transition owed much to the literati’s conception of the palpable political, social, and economic problems of dynastic decline, which eventuated in the fall of the Ming and the establishment of a conquest dynasty. As they saw it, the root cause of dynastic declension and demise was the pervasive moral and spiritual degeneration brought on by the intellectual bankruptcy of the late Ming, as learning and thinking fell under the pernicious sway of empty intuitionism and internal introspection. A moribund culture and a weak state could only be reinvigorated with the right kind of learning that was concrete, practical, and substantive. This culture of criticism as a result placed a premium on the classics, the actual words of the ancient sages as the substantive source of authority. Antiquity itself, personified by the efficacious virtuous deeds of the sages, served as the exemplar of order and amelioration. As particular attention was lavished on the thorough, literal understanding of these texts and words, an intellectualist philosophical outlook emerged in the world of thought and learning. Yü Ying-shih has famously labeled this outlook “intellectualism”, which is an ideal-type thinking abstracted from the Confucian quest for “the way of inquiry and learning” (dao wenxue), in contradistinction to the anti-intellectualist enterprise of “honoring the heaven-endowed moral virtuous nature” (zun dexing). The former sought data and corroborations of realities in the external realm of myriad phenomena and things, whereas the latter appealed intuitively to the internal realm of one’s very nature, whose quiddity was morally good, insofar as it was endowed by heaven. If Song-Ming philosophical thought was characterized by its identification with inner moral reckoning and awakening, then the Qing counterpart was marked by its special focusing on external, objective knowledge, whose basis and point of departure were the classical texts as objects of cognitive inquiries.