ABSTRACT
In the Meditations, Descartes alone in his study, sitting by the fire, wrapped in his cloak, resolves to make a clean sweep of all his old opinions - among them, the opinion that external objects are more real than consciousness itself. Descartes had good reason to dismantle this little piece of standard desktop equipment. It was the traditional metaphor for how knowledge is acquired and retained. A common household item, the signet/wax apparatus symbolized the mystery of how the outside world entered the mind and stayed there. The signet/wax apparatus presided over another area of classical enquiry besides epistemology. It was repeatedly evoked to illustrate a similarly mysterious phenomenon: not only how world entered mind to produce thought, but also how man penetrated woman to produce children. In the English Renaissance, comparisons of mechanical and sexual reproduction, imprints and children, seem to multiply, as if the new technology of the printing press revitalized the ancient trope.
