without a word of rebuke to society for its complicity. But in order to assuage his own conscience he grants him extenuating circumstances, which seem a concession of justice, but are, in reality, a denial of justice. For you either believe that a man is responsible for his crime, and in that case the concession of extenuating circumstances 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 any other physical phenomenon. It is evident that the idea of accident, applied to physical nature, is unscientific. Every physical phenomenon is the necessary effect of the causes that determined it beforehand. If those causes are known to us, we have the conviction that that phenomenon is necessary, is fate, and, if we do not know them, we think it is accidental. The same is true of human phenomena. But since we do not know the internal and external causes in the majority of cases, we pretend that they are free phenomena, that is to say, that they are not determined necessarily by their causes. Hence the spiritualistic conception of the free will implies that every human being, in spite of the fact that their internal and external conditions are necessarily predetermined, should be able to come to a deliberate decision by the mere fiat of his or her free will, so that, even though the sum of all the causes demands a no, he or she can decide in favor of yes, and vice versa. Now, who is there that thinks, when deliberating some action, what are the causes that determine his choice? We can justly say that the greater part of our actions are determined by habit, that we make up our minds almost from custom, without considering the reason for or against. When we get up in the morning we go about our customary business quite automatically, we perform it as a function in which we do not think of a free will. We think of that only in unusual and grave cases, when we are called upon to make some special choice, the so-called voluntary deliberation, and then we weigh the reasons for or against; we ponder, we hesitate what to do. Well, even in such cases, so little depends on our will in the deliberations which we are about to take that if any one were to ask us one minute before we have decided what we are going to do, we should not know what we were going to decide. So long as we are undecided, we cannot foresee what we are going to decide; for under the conditions in which we live that part of the psychic process takes place outside of our consciousness. And since we do not know its causes, we cannot tell what will be its effects. Only after we have come to a certain decision can we imagine that it was due to our voluntary action. But shortly before we could not tell, and that proves that it did not depend on us alone. Suppose, for instance, that you have decided to play a joke on a fellow-student, and that you carry it out. He takes it unkindly. You are surprised, because that is contrary to his habits and your expectations. But after a while you learn that your friend had received bad news from home on the preceding morning and was therefore not in a condition to feel like joking, and then you say: "If we had known that we should not have decided to spring the joke on him." That is equivalent to saying that, if the balance of your will had been inclined toward the deciding motive of no, you would have decided no; but not knowing that your friend was distressed and not in his habitual frame of mind, you decided in favor of yes. This sentence: "If I had known this