To's view of the relationship between society and its ruler magnified the Confucian concept of the subject's obligation of loyalty to the monarch ("") by reinforcing it with the Catholic notion of monarchical rule by divine right. He had a modernist vision of historical change, emphasizing the dynamic factor of humanity's perpetually increasing ability to understand and exploit their surroundings. Based on his analysis of historical causality, Tộ argued that the reliance of European countries on "practical studies" as the criteria for training and selecting political decision makers was the secret of their rise to world dominance. He proposed that such a practice should thus be adopted by Vietnam. Vietnam's Confucianist obsession with humanistic and literary studies, as manifested in its mandarin examinations, Tộ believed, was the underlying cause of its lack of dynamism and inability to repel the technologically superior Western powers. Tộ concluded that Vietnam should cease its emphasis on classical Confucian studies in favour of European "practical studies" as the basis for the formation and selection of the ruling elite as well as for the moral sustenance of the people. Tộ argued that whatever "morality gap" might arise from this change would be filled by an all-encompassing legal system, which he saw as a temporal manifestation of God's heavenly morality, to which everyone up to the emperor would be required to submit.