 Neo-Confucian thought in the Song-Ming times bore a strong dimension of ontological ultimacy, such that its criteria of intelligibility may be considered as essentially metaphysical in nature. As the vitalist sensibility began to take center stage in the late Ming and early Qing, there was a shift from the ontological (the essential and transcendent) to the ontic (the contingent and experiential), and the latter came to be expressed as a historicism—a prevailing worldview that appreciated changing particulars rather than a foundational metaphysics of eternal universals. Thus, the term “historicism”, as it is used in the context of Qing philosophy, is interchangeable with descriptions such as “the sense of history”, “the historical” and “historical-mindedness”. Indeed, a permeating sense of history seemed to have formed a common thread that ran through the learning of the intellectual stalwarts who personified the Ming-Qing intellectual transition, such as the aforementioned Wang Fuzhi, Gu Yanwu, and Huang Zongxi. They pursued their subject-matters, such as the classics, institutions, statecraft, and phonology, by coming to grips with their patterns of development and growth, taking into account their diversity and particularity. They were inclined to eschew totalizing metaphysical views that conferred on things and affairs an underpinning unity. Instead, they embraced a historicist perspective that shunned supra-historical principles and transcendent norms, subjecting the investigation of phenomena to a logic of becoming, not being. Lest we exaggerate the extent and influence of this time-bound and relativist historicist perspective, a note of reservation and qualification is needed. While the Qing philosophical mode of intellection no doubt diverged from the ahistoricist Neo-Confucianism that saw history as a function of some ultimate truth such as li, tian, ordao, it was not entirely freed from the belief in some transhistorical and universal reality. The historicism in Qing philosophy was fraught with tension, to the extent that the appreciation for the particularity was tempered by a transhistorical sense of abiding universal order. 