 By the start of the Song dynasty, the Chinese character xing 性, which is usually translated as “nature” or “the nature”, had long been used to refer to important features of people and things that play a major role in defining what they are and determining how they ought to be. For much of the history of Confucian thought before the Song there had been a wide-ranging and generally unresolved debate about the moral character of human nature in particular, with Mencius famously arguing that human nature is good, Xunzi (c. 310–c. 221 BCE) contending that it is bad, and others defending various moderate and hybrid views (Tiwald 2016: 437–440). By the end of the 11th century, however, a consensus formed around a strong interpretation of the doctrine that people are good by nature, according to which people have well-formed moral dispositions and sensitivities innately and permanently. Cheng Yi developed the most influential formulation of this view. According to Cheng, humans necessarily have a good nature because humans necessarily have Pattern (li), which includes the tendencies toward life-generativity that all things share, and this Pattern is an essential and important feature of ourselves, determinative of what we are and how we ought to be. Cheng and later Neo-Confucians took his interpretation to be implicit in the works of the authoritative classical Confucians, especially Mencius, but it is evident that their interpretation was more radical than what Mencius in fact thought. Mencius is most plausibly read as endorsing the view that we are born with strong proclivities or sprouts of goodness which, if we are provided with a healthy upbringing, will naturally develop into virtues, and his primary concern was with the nature of humans in particular, not the nature of all living things (Mencius 2A6, 6A1–6, 6A8). Cheng Yi and most of the notable Neo-Confucians after him, however, thought we had well-formed dispositions and sensitivities right from the start, that these are ineradicable features of us, and that they are in fact universally shared, so that the nature in us is essentially the same as the nature in all things (Ivanhoe 2016: 36–48; Tiwald &amp; Van Norden 2014: 159, 166).