This is to this day the current conception of
crime. And the illusion of a free human will (the only miraculous factor
in the eternal ocean of cause and effect) leads to the assumption that
one can choose freely between virtue and vice. How can you still believe
in the existence of a free will, when modern psychology armed with all
the instruments of positive modern research, denies that there is any
free will and demonstrates that every act of a human being is the
result of an interaction between the personality and the environment of
man?
And how is it possible to cling to that obsolete idea of moral guilt,
according to which every individual is supposed to have the free choice
to abandon virtue and give himself up to crime? The positive school of
criminology maintains, on the contrary, that it is not the criminal who
wills; in order to be a criminal it is rather necessary that the
individual should find himself permanently or transitorily in such
personal, physical and moral conditions, and live in such an
environment, which become for him a chain of cause and effect,
externally and internally, that disposes him toward crime. This is our
conclusion, which I anticipate, and it constitutes the vastly different
and opposite method, which the positive school of criminology employs as
compared to the leading principle of the classic school of criminal
science.
In this method, this essential principle of the positive school of
criminology, you will find another reason for the seemingly slow advance
of this school.
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