Xunzi is the most systematic thinker the tradition produced and its longest-standing embarrassment. He argued that human nature is bad and goodness is deliberate construction; that Heaven is a regular natural process with no moral intentions, so that praying for rain is theatre and irrigation is agriculture; and that ritual is a human invention for shaping desire, which is precisely why it is indispensable. His chapters on learning, on the rectification of names and on dispelling obsession are the closest early China comes to sustained analytical philosophy. He also taught Han Fei and Li Si, the two figures most associated with the Legalism that ran the Qin — which the later tradition never forgave, though the connection is more about method than doctrine. He was removed from the Confucian temple in 1530 during a Ming purification of the canon, and his tablet was not restored until 1919. Twentieth-century scholarship, Chinese and Western, has largely rehabilitated him, and a number of contemporary philosophers regard him as the more defensible Confucian.