Descartes starts by invalidating (for the arguments sake) any thought that could possibly be weakened by any argument. What he hopes is left is only that which is certain and unshaken. Only after doing this he begins his thinking on the question, "what is man." He decides to focus only on the things that come spontaneously into his head when thinking about this question.

The first thoughts he talks about when doing this is those of the characteristics of the body and the soul. To the soul he attributes his senses and his thoughts, and that he takes in food and walks about. Yet, he doesn't quite know exactly or did not think about what a soul was. To the body he attributes that he has a face, hands, arms and other bodily members. However, he had no doubts on what the body was. He describes it as being, "capable of being bounded by so

Here is where the wax argument comes in. Descartes talks about the bodies, or material objects, that we touch and see. In order not to confuse us in talking about generalities he chooses a particular body, a piece of wax. Having all the normal properties of any object - color, shape, size, etc. - it also has its particular properties that are specific to wax and to that particular piece of wax. But, when Descartes brings the wax close to the fire, many of these properties begin to change, even its more general properties such as its color and its shape. In fact, its size increases and it becomes hotter to the touch. Descartes questions this change, "Does the same wax still remain?" He says it does and that no one thinks otherwise. From this he concludes that none of the properties he learned through the senses were the same afterwards, but the wax still remained. It was still there, it still existed, but it was just different.

At the end of all this thinking of who he is, Descartes finally decides to stop and meditate on this new information he has discovered. His conclusion is that out of everything he has thought of, his mind is the most distinctly perceived thing he knows and that bodies, or objects, are only known through the minds understanding of them alone and not through the senses or the imagination.

This brings up the question of the wax's essence. Descartes says that the wax itself was never really any of those properties his senses experienced. After removing everything in his mind that does not belong to the wax, he comes up with what is left, that it is extended, flexible and mutable. He questions what to be flexible and mutable is and finds that the wax can be changed into an innumerable number of shapes, but that this is not known by the imagination but by the judgments of his own mind. Then, he questions what to be ext

Some common words found in the essay are:
Meditation Descartes, body soul, according descartes, wax comes, color shape size, shape size, flexible mutable, thinking question, color shape, piece wax, inspection mind, mind perceives,
Approximate Word count = 1258
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)