  This, of course, does not make the world, or its particular inhabitants any less real (or any more phenomenal) in Desgabets’s view. Quite to the contrary, Desgabets thought that the foundation he had laid out supports the natural realist in each of us. The individuation of matter into sensible objects is a mode of thought in so far as the mind gives particular objects (local assemblages of dispositions of matter) their extrinsic form, but that such conceived or known objects actually exist outside the understanding by an intrinsic form, as modes or states of matter.