Human Nature Is Good: The Four Sprouts

Mencius (Mengzi, 4th century BCE) is, after Confucius himself, the most important figure of the Confucian tradition, and his signature doctrine is that human nature is good (xing shan). Human beings, he argued, are born with the incipient "sprouts" (duan) of the four cardinal virtues, the feeling of compassion, which is the sprout of benevolence (ren); the feeling of shame, the sprout of righteousness (yi); the feeling of deference, the sprout of ritual propriety; and the sense of right and wrong, the sprout of wisdom. His famous thought-experiment makes the case: anyone who suddenly saw a child about to fall into a well would feel a pang of alarm and pity, not from calculation but spontaneously, proof that the moral sprout is native to us. Morality, then, is not imposed from outside but cultivated from within, like tending a plant; a person becomes bad only by starving or damaging what was originally there. This optimistic account of human nature, framed against rivals like Yang Zhu and the Mohists, became central to later Confucian thought.