And he says, think about this piece of wax,
it's just been taken from the honeycomb.
It still tastes of honey and has a scent of flowers,
from which the honey was gathered.
It's colour, shape, and size are all plain to see, it's hard, cold, and
can be handled easily, if you rap it with your knuckle it makes a sound.
In short it does everything that seems to be needed for
a body to be known perfectly clearly that it seems to hold the wax in my hand. It would
seem that I know it as well that I could possibly want to.
But, as I speak these words, I hold the wax near to the fire and look:
the taste and smell vanish, the colour changes,
the shape is lost, this size increases and the wax becomes liquid and hot.
You can hardly even touch it and it no longer makes a sound when you strike it.
You just get this goop that sticks to your knuckle or something, but
it's still the same wax.
So what was it about the wax that I understood so clearly?
I certainly had a clear mental grasp of the thing, so to speak.
Evidently it was not any one of the features that the senses told me of,
for all of them brought to me through taste and smell and touch and hearing,
they've now all altered and it's still the same wax that I had before.
So Descartes wants to suggest now that there's a sense in which I perceive
more with my mind than with my senses.
Sensory experience is like caloric intake, I need some of it in order to think.
But thinking proper doesn't happen until I peer through these sensory
experiences of the sensation of yellow or the sensation of sweet smell and
say those aren't properties in the wax itself.
The wax could lose those properties and still persist, he argues, and yet
I'm able to grasp the wax with my mind. How do I do that he asks?
By grasping what we now call primary qualities,
qualities that are mathematically definable, such as extension,
location, space and time, number, mass, velocity, motion and the like.
This stuff of physical description;
if there are any objects outside of my mind that exist,
then, in so far as I know them, I will know them by virtue of those types of
properties, those types of primary qualities.
Whereas describing something as being yellow or fragrant,
soft, hard, as the case may be is not a description of the thing itself, but
rather what we now refer to as a secondary quality.
And a capacity for the thing to produce an experience in me, and in a way that does
not objectively correspond to how things are, so to speak, in themselves.
So then, if there is any wax out there, if there are any objects
external to my mind then as far as I know them,
it's by means of this mathematically expressible description.
I need to be able to give it in rigorous mathematical terms otherwise what I'll
take to be knowledge will not be genuine knowledge.
It'll be more my imposition of my experiential connection with the world
than objective, scientific knowledge.
So by the end of Meditation Two, Descartes takes itself to know a few thing,
first of all that he exists.
Secondly, how things seem to him to be, those expressed in second order thoughts,
second order judgements; third, what kind of being he is.
That's the passage that we quoted talking about, what am I,
a thing that thinks and wills and understands, etc.
And finally, what properties external objects would have to have
if there are any there to be known.
And those properties, those primary qualities, have to do with extension,
number, location, direction and velocity of movement, etc.
Descartes puts that conditionally if there are any things external to my mind and
if I know them they would have to be known by means of those sorts of properties.