The quasi-history of our sensory concepts starts with a mythical beginning in which the concepts that we think of as concepts of sensible qualities are taken to be concepts of the very substance of things.  ‘Blue triangle’ is construed as we would now construe ‘metal triangle’.  But treating sensibles as substantive cannot go very far; it does not provide a useful way of classifying, explaining, and predicting the behavior of the things we encounter.  The sensibles soon become treated as occurrent qualities of substances with complex causal profiles. The view that the sensibles are modifications of substances is then supplemented with the notion that they possess a subsidiary and analogous being-for-mind that explains our ability to apprehend them directly (unlike causal dispositions) and to be sometimes mistaken about their presence.  In the current manifest image, this is how we think of sensible properties, according to Sellars.  Physical objects are colored, odorous, etc., but ‘color,’ ‘odor,’etc. also apply in an analogous way to our sensory states.  The rise of a new, atomistic science has started to push our conception of the sensibles in new directions.  First, it encourages a reinterpretation of the distinction between the common and the proper sensibles.  The common sensibles, those available to more than one sense, include such geometric and dynamic properties as shape and motion; these apply to physical objects and their microconstituents, because physical explanations exploit such properties.  The proper sensibles are the qualities available only to specific senses, including colors, odors, etc., and they do not apply to the microconstituents of physical objects, because they do no explanatory work in physical laws.  Primary and secondary qualities are distinct in kind, and secondary qualities are demoted to second-class, subjective status.  They exist only in the mind, as states of the perceiver.  The next move seems clear: the mind itself is subjected to scientific investigation and becomes increasingly identified with the brain or central nervous system.  But the proper sensibles can no more exist in the brain than in any other kind of matter.  This brings us to our current predicament: we are unable to find a place in the world for the proper sensibles, which have been brutually (and metaphysically) severed from the common sensibles, even though color and extension, for example, seem intrinsically related.