In so far as this school and this publicism were signs of a practical movement, the philosophical interest held in them a secondary place and discharged a function of minor importance: so that, secondly, the works on natural right, philosophically considered, did not as a rule rise above a simple popular empiricism. The principles on which they rest are not examined and often not even superficially reconciled: the concepts which they use are less concepts than general representations: and the form of the writing is systematic in appearance only. Some of these writers endeavoured to harmonise their doctrines of natural right with the Platonic, Stoic or Cartesian philosophies, or appealed to logical or metaphysical axioms, or made use of deduction and the mathematical method. But all this was mere aggregation, not fusion; ornament, not reinforcement: at most, it was of value as a proof of diligence and earnest intentions. The philosophy, however, which was more or less implicit in the pamphleteers of natural rights, and explicit in the philosophers who set out to elaborate the doctrine, agreed with the spirit of the time, whose general characteristics are well known. Thus arose the third or ethical aspect of natural right, namely its utilitarianism; sometimes more or less concealed, sometimes openly declared, and worked out from time to time by a philosophy of mathematical or sensationalistic methods, and of materialistic or rationalistic tendencies: or else, what comes practically to the same thing, an abstract and intellectualistic morality, threatening at any moment to fall into utilitarianism. From this intellectualism and utilitarianism, combined with the practical and revolutionary character of this mental movement,--which was bent rather upon bringing about the triumph of an abstract system of right than upon recognising that which really develops in history, in all the complexity of its many forms and vicissitudes--derived its fourth characteristic, the lack of historical sense, or the anti-historical attitude of the school, which set up the abstract ideal of a human nature apart from human history instead of fused with and living in it. Finally, bourgeois, anticlerical, utilitarian and materialistic as it was, the movement of natural right had a fifth important trait, namely its aversion to transcendence and its tendency towards an immanental conception of man and of society. This characteristic is neither fully explained nor fully worked out in the doctrines, but is none the less easily recognised among the total views of the school.