 To capture the philosophical sense of wisdom (-sophy), they picked a likely candidate from the classical East Asian tradition, namely, tetsu. More provocative, though, was their choice for the other part of the neologism, namely, gaku. That word also had a classical pedigree: it signified learning, especially in the sense of modeling oneself after a textual or human model (that is, a master text or a personal master). Probably more significantly, though, the term gaku at the time was prominent in neologisms for disciplines in the newly established Western-style universities, functioning as an equivalent for the German Wissenschaft. Hence, it rendered the -ology suffix of fields like biology or geology as well as the humanistic “sciences” (Wissenschaften) like history or literary studies. By this protocol of nomenclature, the Western discipline of philosophy came to be called in Japan by the compound word tetsugaku and academic philosophers were (and still are) called tetsugakusha, that is, “ones who partake in the Wissenschaft of wisdom.”