Rene Descartes 1596-1650 Rene Descartes 1596-1650

Little emphasis on on sense experience & experimentCompared with Bacon & Hobbes, Descartes puts very littleemphasis in his method upon sense experience & experiment inachieving knowledge. How is that we know the essentialqualities? For ex. Descartes asks: “At one time a piece of wax ishard, has a certain shape, color, size, and fragrance. But when webring it close to the fire its fragrance vanishes, its shape & colorare lost, and its size increases. What remains in the wax thatpermits us still to know it is wax?” “It cannot, “ says Descartes,“be anything that I observed by means of the senses, sinceeverything in the field of taste, smell, sight, touch, & hearing ischanged, & still the same wax nevertheless remains.” It is“nothing but my understanding alone which does conceiveit…solely an inspection of the mind,’ which enables me to knowthe true qualities of the wax. “What I have said about the wax canbe applied to all other things external to me.”He relies for the most part upon the truths contained in the mind,“deriving them from [no] other source than certain germs of truth25which exist naturally in our souls.”