Legge is a famous missionary in the west and his understanding of Confucianism is worth exploring.
With The Analects of Confucius translated by Legge as the research object, this study attempted to construct the
qualia structure of the character “ren” which appears most frequently in The Analects of Confucius and further
investigate the distribution of different qualia roles. The achieved results show that in Legge’s translated version,
evaluation role takes the largest proportion and all of them are positive, which indicates that Legge shares some
consensus with Chinese philosophy. However, the lack of telic role also reflects that the mission of Legge, a
missionary, is to propagate western ideas in China. Additionally, the factors that influence Legge’s attitude were
studied with the hope to provide new ideas for sinology research and enhance the applicability of qualia structure.