Wax Argument

The wax argument appears in Rene Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy as part of his broader case that the intellect, rather than the senses or the imagination, is the true source of reliable knowledge about physical objects. Descartes considers a piece of beeswax fresh from the honeycomb, noting all of the sensory qualities it presents, its taste, smell, color, shape and firmness, then observes that when the wax is brought near a fire every one of those sensory qualities changes completely, its smell fades, its color alters, its shape is lost and it turns to liquid, while people nonetheless judge that it remains the very same piece of wax throughout. Since none of the wax's particular sensory qualities survive this transformation, Descartes argues that whatever makes the wax the same object cannot be grasped by the senses or pictured by the imagination, but must instead be understood by the intellect alone as an extended, flexible and changeable thing capable of taking on countless different sensory appearances, a conclusion Descartes takes to support the primacy of reason over sense perception in grounding genuine knowledge.