Project Gutenberg's The Positive School of Criminology, by Enrico Ferri

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Title: The Positive School of Criminology
Three Lectures Given at the University of Naples, Italy on April 22, 23 and 24, 1901

Author: Enrico Ferri

Release Date: January 2, 2004 [EBook #10580]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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THE POSITIVE SCHOOL OF CRIMINOLOGY

Three Lectures

Given at the University of Naples, Italy on April 22, 23 and 24, 1901

By Enrico Ferri

Translated by Ernest Untermann

Chicago

Charles H. Kerr & Company

1908

THE POSITIVE SCHOOL OF CRIMINOLOGY

I.

My Friends:

When, in the turmoil of my daily occupation, I received an invitation,
several months ago, from several hundred students of this famous
university, to give them a brief summary, in short special lectures, of
the principal and fundamental conclusions of criminal sociology, I
gladly accepted, because this invitation fell in with two ideals of
mine. These two ideals are stirring my heart and are the secret of my
life. In the first place, this invitation chimed with the ideal of my
personal life, namely, to diffuse and propagate among my brothers the
scientific ideas, which my brain has accumulated, not through any merit
of mine, but thanks to the lucky prize inherited from my mother in the
lottery of life. And the second ideal which this invitation called up
before my mind's vision was this: The ideal of young people of Italy,
united in morals and intellectual pursuits, feeling in their social
lives the glow of a great aim. It would matter little whether this aim
would agree with my own ideas or be opposed to them, so long as it
should be an ideal which would lift the aspirations of the young people
out of the fatal grasp of egoistic interests. Of course, we positivists
know very well, that the material requirements of life shape and
determine also the moral and intellectual aims of human consciousness.
But positive science declares the following to be the indispensable
requirement for the regeneration of h