In France, the _Essay_ at first made little way. It took more than twenty years to sell off the first edition of the French translation, but from 1723 to 1758 editions followed one another in rapid succession at intervals of about six years. Voltaire says that no man had been less read or more abused in France than Locke. The points in his philosophy which seem to have been specially selected for attack were the statements that God might, if he pleased, annex thought to matter, and that the natural reason could not alone assure us of the immortality of the soul. The qualifications, as the custom is, were dropped out of these statements, and it was roundly asserted that Locke maintained the soul to be material and mortal. Voltaire does not fail to point out the hastiness and injustice of these conclusions, and is himself unbounded in his admiration for the English philosopher. Malebranche, he says, is read on account of the agreeableness of his style, Descartes on account of the hardihood of his speculations; Locke is not read, because he is merely wise. There never was a thinker more wise, more methodical, more logical than Locke. Other reasoners had written a romance of the soul; Locke came and modestly wrote its history, developing the ideas of the human understanding as an accomplished anatomist explains the forces of the human body. Voltaire lived to see the philosophy of Locke, or rather an extreme phase of it, become almost the established creed of those who cared at all for speculative questions in France. Condillac in his early work, the _Essai sur l'Origine des Connoissances Humaines_ (first published in 1746), simply adopts Locke's account of the origin of knowledge, finding it in the two sources of Sensation and Reflection. But in his later work, the _Traité des Sensations_, which appeared in 1754, he has gone far beyond his master, and not only finds the origin of all knowledge in sensation alone, but of all our faculties as well. It is in this work that the metaphor of the gradually animated statue occurs. Condillac's system soon became the fashionable philosophy of his countrymen, and both friends and foes credited Locke with its parentage. With Joseph de Maistre, who may be regarded as the bitterest exponent of French Ultramontanism, Locke is the immediate link through whom Helvétius, Cabanis, and the other enemies of the human race in France had derived from Bacon the principles which had been so destructive to their country and mankind. But it was not the followers of Condillac only who professed to base their systems on the principles of Locke. Degerando, writing in 1813, says, "All the French philosophers of this age glory in ranging themselves among the disciples of Locke, and admitting his principles." The great names of Turgot, Diderot, D'Alembert, Condorcet, and Destutt de Tracy alike appear in the roll of his professed disciples. And even when the reaction against the authority of Locke began in France, his influence might still be traced in authors like Maine de Biran, Royer Collard, Cousin, and Jouffroy, however emphatically they might repudiate his system as a whole. Lastly, Auguste Comte may be connected with Locke through Hume.