of Nishi’s most significant topics in his encyclopedia was the importance of the study of history, as he believed history was an objective, scholarly discipline that was necessary for the understanding of all human relations and interactions. In this way, learning should not just be for learning’s sake, as it does not serve a greater purpose if it is just to learn. This argument stood in direct contradiction to the Confucian denial of the study of history as a progress of human events. Subsequently, the most distinguished topic of Nishi’s encyclopedia is his elaboration on philosophy. Nishi split the study philosophy into numerous subtopics, citing logic as the most important. He rejected the deductive method traditionally used by Confucian scholars in favor of inductive logic as a more scientific way of learning. In 1873, Nishi helped to found Japan’s first scholarly society for solely academics (and not politics) known as the Meiji Six Society. The goals of this society were to educate and enlighten the people because they believed Japan needed an enlightened populace in order to understand and live up to its political and moral responsibilities of modernization and restoration. Nishi felt that if the new state were to become enlightened as it should be, there would be no more conflict between political and scholarly obligations within the Meiji Six Society, and within Japanese society in general. Nishi was unique in this society in that he maintained a view of Japanese modernization in which he reconciled traditional Confucianism with Western Philosophy and pragmatism together in order to ascertain the correct path for Japan to take. In his Hyakuichi-Shinron, published in 1874, he went so far as to reject Confucian ethics altogether as no longer appropriate for Japan, but was careful not to reject Japanese heritage. This publication was an original piece of Nishi scholarship that dealt with two main topics: the separation of politics and morals, and the distinction between human and physical principles. In regards to the first topic, Nishi felt that the later Confucians who presumed that self-cultivation was all that was necessary for ruling society were wrong, but that the original Confucians who proclaimed that the morality taught had practical application in society were right. What is more is that Nishi portrayed Confucius as a teacher of politics with a sideline of morality. Nishi attempted to sever the philosophical connection between morality and politics because he