The Positive School of Criminology | Page 8

is a hypocrisy; or you grant them in good
faith, and then you admit that the man was in circumstances which
reduced his moral responsibility, and thereby the extenuating
circumstances become a denial of justice. For if your conviction
concerning such circumstances were sincere, you would go to the
bottom of them and examine with the light of your understanding all

those innumerable conditions which contribute toward those
extenuating circumstances. But what are those extenuating
circumstances? Family conditions? Take it that a child is left alone by
its parents, who are swallowed up in the whirl of modern industry,
which overthrows the laws of nature and forbids the necessary rest,
because steam engines do not get tired and day work must be followed
by night work, so that the setting of the sun is no longer the signal for
the laborer to rest, but to begin a new shift of work. Take it that this
applies not alone to adults, but also to human beings in the growing
stage, whose muscular power may yield some profit for the capitalists.
Take it that even the mother, during the period of sacred maternity,
becomes a cog in the machinery of industry. And you will understand
that the child must grow up, left to its own resources, in the filth of life,
and that its history will be inscribed in criminal statistics, which are the
shame of our so-called civilization.
Of course, in this first lecture I cannot give you even a glimpse of the
positive results of that modern science which has studied the criminal
and his environment instead of his crimes. And I must, therefore, limit
myself to a few hints concerning the historical origin of the positive
school of criminology. I ought to tell you something concerning the
question of free will. But you will understand that such a momentous
question, which is worthy of a deep study of the many-sided physical,
moral, intellectual life, cannot be summed up in a few short words. I
can only say that the tendency of modern natural sciences, in
physiology as well as psychology, has overruled the illusions of those
who would fain persist in watching psychological phenomena merely
within themselves and think that they can understand them without any
other means. On the contrary, positive science, backed by the testimony
of anthropology and of the study of the environment, has arrived at the
following conclusions: The admission of a free will is out of the
question. For if the free will is but an illusion of our internal being, it is
not a real faculty possessed by the human mind. Free will would imply
that the human will, confronted by the choice of making voluntarily a
certain determination, has the last decisive word under the pressure of
circumstances contending for and against this decision; that it is free to
decide for or against a certain course independently of internal and

external circumstances, which play upon it, according to the laws of
cause and effect.
Take it that a man has insulted me. I leave the place in which I have
been insulted, and with me goes the suggestion of forgiveness or of
murder and vengeance. And then it is assumed that a man has his
complete free will, unless he is influenced by circumstances explicitly
enumerated by the law, such as minority, congenital deaf-muteness,
insanity, habitual drunkenness and, to a certain extent, violent passion.
If a man is not in a condition mentioned in this list, he is considered in
possession of his free will, and if he murders he is held morally
responsible and therefore punished.
This illusion of a free will has its source in our inner consciousness,
and is due solely to the ignorance in which we find ourselves
concerning the various motives and different external and internal
conditions which press upon our mind at the moment of decision.
If a man knows the principal causes which determine a certain
phenomenon, he says that this phenomenon is inevitable. If he does not
know them, he considers it as an accident, and this corresponds in the
physical field to the arbitrary phenomenon of the human will which
does not know whether it shall decide this way or that. For instance,
some of us were of the opinion, and many still are, that the coming and
going of meteorological phenomena was accidental and could not he
foreseen. But in the meantime, science has demonstrated that they are
likewise subject to the law of causality, because it discovered the
causes which enable us to foresee their course. Thus weather prognosis
has made wonderful progress by the help of a network of
telegraphically connected meteorological stations, which succeeded in
demonstrating the connection between cause and effect in the case of
hurricanes, as well as of