And the renewal of this opportunity gave
me so much moral satisfaction that, I could not under any circumstances
decline your invitation. Then too, the Neapolitan Atheneum has
maintained the reputation of the Italian mind in the 19th century, also
in that science which even foreign scientists admit to be our specialty,
namely the science of criminology. In fact, aside from the two terrible
books of the Digest, and from the practical criminologists of the Middle
Ages who continued the study of criminality, the modern world opened a
glorious page in the progress of criminal science with the modest little
book of Cesare Beccaria. This progress leads from Cesare Beccaria, by
way of Francesco Carrara, to Enrico Pessina.
Enrico Pessina alone remains of the two giants who concluded the cycle
of classic school of criminology. In a lucid moment of his scientific
consciousness, which soon reverted to the old abstract and metaphysical
theories, he announced in an introductory statement in 1879, that
criminal justice would have to rejuvenate itself in the pure bath of the
natural sciences and substitute in place of abstraction the living and
concrete study of facts. Naturally every scientist has his function and
historical significance; and we cannot expect that a brain which has
arrived at the end of its career should turn towards a new direction. At
any rate, it is a significant fact that this most renowned
representative of the classic school of criminology should have pointed
out this need of his special science in this same university of Naples,
one year after the inauguration of the positive school of criminology,
that he should have looked forward to a time when the study of natural
and positive facts would set to rights the old juridical abstractions.
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