It would be as useless to seek the common measure of these various social types, as to ask what is the real age of the individual life, the common measure of childhood, youth, maturity and old age. The comparison is one presented by Vico himself. As children shape all their ideas according to their whims and carry them out with violence, as youths animate everything by their imagination, as grown men guide their affairs rather by pure reason and old men by sound prudence; so it is with the human race, which after its feeble, isolated and poverty-stricken origins, grows at first in unrestrained liberty, then rediscovers the necessaries, utilities and comforts of life by genius and imagination (the age of poetry), and finally cultivates wisdom by means of reason (the age of philosophy). Similarly, natural right arose first in laws so to speak of just passion and just violence: then it was clothed in various myths of just reason: and finally it was openly proclaimed in its pure rationality and noble truth. By such a method of handling and passing judgment upon governments, laws and customs, Vico, escaped another of the leading doctrines or suppositions of the school of natural rights, the abstraction and anti-historicism we mentioned in its own place, which resulted in the conception of a natural law standing above positive law and therefore constituting a kind of eternal code, a perfect scheme of legislation, not yet fully actual but to be actualised, whose outlines show up clearly in the works of the school through their veil of doctrine and philosophy. But this eternal code was in its most important part a contingent and transitory code; or at least it advocated a code in agreement with the reformatory and revolutionary tendencies of these writers, publicists as they were rather than philosophers.