  Le Grand lived in London for many years before retiring to Oxfordshire towards the close of his life in 1695. He was generally well-received at the University of Cambridge, perhaps owing to the influence of some leading Neo-Platonists at Cambridge such as John Smith, Henry More, and Ralph Cudworth, who were at least initially sympathetic to Descartes’s ideas. John Smith, author of Select Discourses (1660), and the earliest recorded partisan of the Cartesian philosophy in England, was the first to introduce the study of Descartes to Cambridge. Henry More corresponded with Descartes, and was sympathetic until about 1665, when he launched the most vigorous attack on Cartesianism in the age, in his Enchiridion Metaphysicum (1671). Cudworth, like More although with less venom, objected to Descartes’s mechanistic account of the material world in his The True Intellectual System of the Universe (1678). It was Le Grand who debated and defended Descartes’s philosophy to these English critics. 