wild disorder and
destruction. This great revolution of Pinel, Chiarugi, and others,
changed the attitude of the public mind toward the insane. While
formerly insanity had been regarded as a moral sin, the public
conscience, thanks to the enlightening work of science, henceforth had
to adapt itself to the truth that insanity is a disease like all
others, that a man does not become insane because he wants to, but that
he becomes insane through hereditary transmission and the influence of
the environment in which he lives, being predisposed toward insanity and
becoming insane under the pressure of circumstances.

The positive school of criminology accomplished the same revolution in
the views concerning the treatment of criminals that the above named men
of science accomplished for the treatment of the insane. The general
opinion of classic criminalists and of the people at large is that crime
involves a moral guilt, because it is due to the free will of the
individual who leaves the path of virtue and chooses the path of crime,
and therefore it must be suppressed by meeting it with a proportionate
quantity of punishment. 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 le