Hence the untrustworthiness of those critical schemata, so attractive for their compact order, which first make Voltaire a Lockian sensationalist, and then trace his deism to his sensationalism. We have already seen that he was a deist before he came to England, just as Lord Herbert of Cherbury was a deist, who wrote before Locke was born. It was not the metaphysical revolution of Locke which led to deism, but the sort of way in which he thought about metaphysics, a way which was immediately applied to theology by other people, whether assailants or defenders of the current opinions. Locke’s was ‘common-sense thinking,’ and the fashion spread. The air was thick with common-sense objections to Christianity, as it was with common-sense ideas as to the way in which we come to have ideas. There was no temperament to which such an atmosphere could be so congenial as Voltaire’s, of whom we cannot too often repeat, considering the vulgar reputation he has for violence and excess, that he was in thought the very genius of good sense, whether or no we fully admit M. Cousin’s qualification of it as superficial good sense. It has been said that he always speaks of Descartes, Leibnitz, and Spinoza, like a man to whom nature has refused the metaphysical sense.[71] At any rate he could never agree with them, and he never tried to find truth by the roads which they had made. It is true, however, that he shows no sign of special fitness for metaphysics, any more than he did for physical science. The metaphysics of Locke lay undeveloped in his mind, just as the theory of evolution lies in so many minds at the present time. There is a faint informal reference of other theories to this central and half-seen standard. When metaphysical subjects came before him, he felt that he had this for a sheet-anchor, and he did not greatly care to keep proving it again and again by continued criticism or examination. The upshot of his acquaintance with Locke was a systematic adherence to common-sense modes of thinking; and he always betrayed the faults and shortcomings to which such modes inevitably lead, when they are brought, to the exclusion of complementary ideas, to the practical subjects that comprehend more than prudence, self-interest, and sobriety. The subject that does beyond any other comprehend more than these elements is religion, and the substantial vices of Voltaire’s objections to religion first arose from his familiarity with the English form of deism, and his instinctive feeling for its method.