Descartes (Second Meditation) considers a piece of wax that, when heated, changes its properties yet remains wax. He concludes that the “wax” must not be accessible to the senses, since sensible properties all change but the wax remains:

“what was there in the wax that was so distinctly grasped? Certainly none of the aspects that I reached by means of the senses. For whatever came under the senses of taste, smell, sight, touch or hearing has now changed; and yet the wax remains.”  Thus we can distinguish wax from external forms”as if stripping it of its clothing, and look at the wax in its nakedness.”  Real wax is naked wax; sensible properties are clothing that can be stripped.

Descartes seems to be assuming an atemporal view of substance - whatever the wax really is must be that which is underneath the changes.  What if wax isn’t that which stays permanent the same under the changing clothes, but the history of its costume changes?  Or, what if the wax  is the-thing-in-various-guises?

In any case, for Descartes, this is what bodies are - extended things clothed in properties.  Descartes goes on to argue that “since I now know that even bodies are not, properly speaking, perceived by the senses or by the faculty of imagination, but by the intellect alone, and that they are not perceived through their being touched or seen, but only through their being understood.”

This is an argument designed to refute skepticism and shore up knowledge.  But the result is the opposite: what is real about bodies is not what we perceive or imagine but what the intellect sees, with its X-ray vision, under the clothing of properties.  Skepticism is built into the system.

Which means that (counter-intuitively to some) the truly anti -skeptical position is one that builds the temporality of substances into the foundation of things.  When substance is thing-in-time’s-changes, then change is no longer a chimera and substance is no longer the nakedness beneath.  What we see, smell, taste, touch, hear is what we get; that’s what’s there, in all its mutability and variety.

This is not to say, of course, that there are dimensions to reality that escape the senses.  There are; still, what we touch with our senses is what’s there.