Influenced by Wang Yangming’s “doctrine of the mind” (xinxue), literati of the Gong’an school held the opinion that the normal (chang) and the exceptional (qi) are concepts derived from people’s cognitive process rather than the material attributes of things, Hence, they maintained that the world could not be defined and measured by any individual's views. To achieve the spiritual goal of “seeing the normal in the exceptional”, the Gong'an school literati sided with the exceptional and vehemently attacked the normal. For the Gong’an school, the exceptional people fell into three types: religious recluses, heroes with practical statecraft, and literati with integrity and taste, and common to all the three types of people was their independent spirit. Overall, literati of the Gong’an school built their unconventional literary dispositions in late Ming literature by introducing the independent personalities to literary creation.