G.F. Stout on Secondary Qualities

G.F. Stout argues that secondary qualities—color, sound, taste, odor, heat, cold, and the likes—are physically real: “There is no reason,” he writes, “why the physical world, should not be pervaded through and through by secondary qualities” (Stout 1931, 281). I reconstruct his argument for this thesis and argue that it rests on a distinctively Brentanian premise, namely the claim that our sensory experiences, however basic, typically exhibit some internal complexity (the so-called act-content-object structure). I explicate how this claim is employed to support the physical reality of secondary qualities, and how it puts Stout in a position to reconcile common sense and science by accommodating two sets of apparently conflicting data in his theory.