1. Contemporary studies of human visual perception often distinguish visual thought from visual sensory content.1 Perception is thereby described as somehow "involving" (i) intentional sapience-features and (ii) nonintentional sentience-features characteristic of visual sen tience (see especially W. Sellars' [41] and [42]). The intellectual lineage of this distinction runs from C. I. Lewis ([24]) and E. Husserl ([18], Studies V, VI), through F. Brentano, to T. Reid and I. Kant ([3], chs. 17-19). Its present establishment was partially motivated by the apparent failure of all attempts at the purely sensory (e.g., phenomenalistic) analysis of experience ([42], ch. 3; [16], chs. 2-5). This essay is devoted to two inseparable philosophical tasks pertain ing to (ii): (a) the intuitive description of our visual sentience, and (b) the description's codification as a precise and interesting theory ("visual" will often be omitted below). The theory T offered here describes certain rudimentary but conceptually central structural traits of sentience, and has the virtues of novelty, simplicity, and satisfactory explanatory depth. It is designed as a contribution to current dis cussions of the "sensuous content" of perception ([1], chs. 10-12; [10]; [ll])2 and the status of "visual qualia" (e.g., [31], ch. 2; [43]) and "raw feels" ([12]).3 I advance T as a fragment of an articulate naturalistic philosophy of mind (cf. [33]; [40]; [41]; [42]). Although no detailed discussion of this metaphysical genus is provided here, two naturalist theses, Theses 1 and 2, will be supported by the analysis. These concern a notion of "visual qualia" to be sketched below (with the help of [14]); they are close to and inspired by principles adopted by W. Sellars for his "scientific realism".