 The famous “wax” thought experiment of the Second Meditation is supposed to illustrate (among other things) a procedure to “dig out” what is innate. The thought experiment purports to help the meditator achieve a “purely mental scrutiny,” thereby apprehending more easily the innate idea of body. (Med. 2, AT 7:30f, CSM 2:20f) According to Descartes, our minds come stocked with a variety of intellectual concepts – ideas whose content is independent of experience. This storehouse includes ideas in mathematics, logic, and metaphysics. Interestingly, Descartes holds that even our sensory ideas involve innate content. On his understanding of the new mechanical physics, bodies have no real properties resembling our sensory ideas of colors, sounds, tastes, and the like, thus implying that the content of such ideas draws from the mind itself. But if even these sensory ideas count as innate, how then are we to characterize the doctrine of innateness? Importantly, the formation of these sensory ideas – unlike purely intellectual concepts – depends on sensory stimulation. On one plausible understanding, Descartes’ official doctrine has it that ideas are innate insofar as their content derives from the nature of the mind alone, as opposed to deriving from sense experience (cf. Newman 2006). This characterization allows that both intellectual and sensory concepts draw on native resources, though not to the same extent.