The Wax Analogy in Descartes' Meditations and Its Purposes.

The wax analogy outlined in Meditations II serves numerous purposes within Descartes' discourse but the one that is outlined as its intended purpose is the establishment of the res cogitans as 'better known' than the res extensa. It also, however, illustrates the distinction between the intellect and the imagination.

The analogy itself goes as follows: If we take the wax from the hive as representing every object and identify its smell, shape and color. We then observe how, after being placed near a flame, every single one of those properties changes. Does the same wax remain? Everybody must agree that it does. Therefore what was it that I knew with such clarity and distinction? The underlying substance, not the 'secondary' properties that we believed to identify this particular entity, established the identity of the wax. In this case, as this particular object is extended but not thinking, it is the res extensa.

Although prima facie, it feels as though the body - a tangible and explicitly visible entity - is better known than the mind, this particular analogy shows that the exact opposite of this assumption is true. The mind always play a role in every experience that we have - it is primary. Even in knowing the External World you must know your mind for it is necessary to interpret that which we perceive. When speaking of the mind being 'better known' it is important to clarify the somewhat ambiguous definition of this particular term. The mind must be 'better known' for it is known - required and used, as it were - even in perceiving the wax and all other entities, not merely when introspecting and internally deliberating. "The perception of it (the wax), or the action by which one perceives it, is not an act of (...) imagination, but only an intuition of the mind" and thus it is through the mind that we are able to know the world.

Another of the wax's purposes is to illustrate how the intellect and the imagination are distinct. The imagination - our sensory experience - is what identifies the contingencies of the external world, the different qualities that on the surface appear to tell us about objective entities and existence. The intellect, conversely, is our ability to reason beyond that which we perceive and make sense of what we see to make logical conclusions. With regard to the wax analogy, if we were to base our assessment of the wax's