In 1754 came the Traité des Sensations of Condillac, in which is most systematically developed the physio-psychological conception of man as an "animated statue," of which the thought is wholly conditioned by the senses. The mode of approach had been laid down before by La Mettrie, by Diderot, and by Buffon; and Condillac is rather a developer and systematizer than an originator; [1086] but in this case the process of unification was to the full as important as the first steps; [1087] and Condillac has an importance which is latterly being rediscovered by the school of Spencer on the one hand and by that of James on the other. Condillac, commonly termed a materialist, no more held the legendary materialistic view than any other so named; and the same may be said of the next figure in the "materialistic" series, J. B. Robinet, a Frenchman settled at Amsterdam, after having been, it is said, a Jesuit. His Nature (4 vols. 1761-1768) is a remarkable attempt to reach a strictly naturalistic conception of things. [1088] But he is a theorist, not an investigator. Even in his fixed idea that the universe is an "animal" he had perhaps a premonition of the modern discovery of the immense diffusion of bacterial life; but he seems to have had more deriders than disciples. He founds at once on Descartes and on Leibnitz, but in his Philosophical Considerations on the natural gradation of living forms (1768) he definitely sets aside theism as illusory, and puts ethics on a strictly scientific and human footing, [1089] extending the arguments of Hume and Hutcheson somewhat on the lines of Mandeville. [1090] On another line of reasoning a similar application of Mandeville's thesis had already been made by Helvétius in his Traité de l'Esprit [1091] (1758), a work which excited a hostility now difficult to understand, but still reflected in censures no less surprising. One of the worst misrepresentations in theological literature is the account of Helvétius by the late Principal Cairns (Unbelief in the Eighteenth Century, 1881, p. 158) as appealing to government "to promote luxury, and, through luxury, public good, by abolishing all those laws that cherish a false modesty and restrain libertinage." Helvétius simply pressed the consequences of the existing theory of luxury, which for his own part he disclaimed. De l'Esprit, Disc. ii, ch. xv. Dr. Pünjer (i, 462) falls so far below his usual standard as to speak of Helvétius in a similar fashion. As against such detraction it is fitting to note that Helvétius, like La Mettrie, was one of the most lovable and most beloved men of his time, though, like him, sufficiently licentious in his youth.