These words seem appropriate when seeking to cognize the conceptual properties of Ogyū Sorai's historicism. A complex scholar of Tokugawa political ethics, Sorai presents us with texts that are “pretty rich and complicated,” and whose full significances have yet to be determined. Although there maybe, in the conceptual characterization that follows, historical similarity, analogy, significant resemblance, and sympathetic perspectives with historicist theorists in other societies, it is not my purpose here to show that Sorai along with other historicists thought similar thoughts, reached identical conclusions, followed the same logic of reason. My main purpose is to uncover Sorai's analytical “preoccupation,” problem solving and explanatory activities, which, in the wording of Sheldon Wolin in his provocative work on “politics and vision,” are also “creative” and “radical.” This means looking for significant intellectual repetitions, arrangements and epistemological constructions with which Sorai perceived, analyzed, and understood things and somehow grasping through these structures of reasoning a comprehensive intellectual pattern and order in his thinking.