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Meinong maintains, then there would be a difference in respect of givenness between dreams and waking life. But if, as we have maintained, what is given is never the thing, but merely one of the "sensibilia" which compose the thing, then what we apprehend in a dream is just as much given as what we apprehend in waking life. Exactly the same argument applies as to the dream-objects being "there."
Any such appearance would be included among sensibilia. If per impossibile there were a complete human body with no mind inside it, all those sensibilia would exist, in relation to that body, which would be sense-data if there were a mind in the body. What the mind adds to sensibilia, in fact, is merely awareness: everything else is physical or physiological.
In this way one "sensibile" in one perspective is correlated with one "sensibile" in another. Such correlated "sensibilia" will be called "appearances of one thing." In Leibniz's monadology, since each monad mirrored the whole universe, there was in each perspective a "sensibile" which was an appearance of each thing. In our system of perspectives, we make no such assumption of completeness.
It is a metaphysical question whether all sensibilia are sense-data, and an epistemological question whether there exist means of inferring sensibilia which are not data from those that are. A few preliminary remarks, to be amplified as we proceed, will serve to elucidate the use which I propose to make of sensibilia.
If we can always say when two "sensibilia" in a given biography are appearances of one thing, then, since we have seen how to connect "sensibilia" in different biographies as appearances of the same momentary state of a thing, we shall have all that is necessary for the complete construction of the history of a thing.
We must ask "Can sensibilia exist without being given?" and also "Can a particular sensibile be at one time a sense-datum, and at another not?" Unless we have the word sensibile as well as the word "sense-datum," such questions are apt to entangle us in trivial logical puzzles. It will be seen that all sense-data are sensibilia.
A given thing will have appearances in some perspectives, but presumably not in certain others. The "thing" being defined as the class of its appearances, if κ is the class of perspectives in which a certain thing θ appears, then θ is a member of the multiplicative class of κ, κ being a class of mutually exclusive classes of "sensibilia."
By regarding "sensibilia" at different times as belonging to the same piece of matter, we are able to define motion, which presupposes the assumption or construction of something persisting throughout the time of the motion.
In discussions on sense-data, two questions are commonly confused, namely: Do sensible objects persist when we are not sensible of them? in other words, do sensibilia which are data at a certain time sometimes continue to exist at times when they are not data? And are sense-data mental or physical?
I shall give the name sensibilia to those objects which have the same metaphysical and physical status as sense-data, without necessarily being data to any mind.
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