 Flanagan (2014) characterizes Mencius’s moral psychology of the four moral sprouts as natural teleology because the moral emotions have deep foundations in human nature with the designated endpoints, i.e., Confucian virtues. This ontological and teleological approach to emotions shows why emotions are important in Confucian philosophy and how emotions and qing can relate to each other. For example, qing appears four times (3A4, 4B46, 6A6, 6A8) in the Mencius and they mean nature/essence or situation/reality. Generally, the semantic content of qing in the Mencius follows that of the Analects: qing is not directly related to inner subjective feelings. Wu zhi qing (物之情) means nature of things (3A4) and ren zhi qing (人之情) means the nature or natural disposition of human beings (6A8). In 6A6, however, qing is used to explain the goodness of human nature in the context of affective feelings, i.e., the four moral sprouts. He states that “From the feelings [qing] proper to it [nature], it is constituted for the practice of what is good” (6A6; Legge 1960b: 402). In this passage, qing refers to the foundation or root of the moral emotions. Mencius explains that all humans, despite their individual differences, have the same foundation of goodness such as the four moral sprouts which are basically moral feelings. These feelings are the foundational essences (qing) of humanity that can become virtuous through the process of cultivation and learning. Although qing in this passage does not refer to inner subjective states of the mind, it means genuine and truthful dispositions of human beings such as the affective orientations of the mind that can be observed in the four moral sprouts. In this passage, qing (nature/essence) comes close to emotions and feelings, not just random feelings but certain feelings with specific innate inclinations that reflect underlying nature of human beings. Here, Mencius opens the door to emotional qing in his discussion of how human beings can become virtuous through the innately given affective sprouts of morality.