 On the whole, the System was not well received. Almost immediately, Mill and Littré put forward the idea that there were a good Comte, the author of the Course, and a bad Comte, the author of the System. However, it is impossible to confine oneself merely to the Course. The early works had made a strong impression on some of the best minds of the time; they remain required reading for everyone wishing to understand positive philosophy, as they are still among the best introductions to the subject. The Course was not part of the initial project, which Comte never lost sight of; the work is best considered as a parenthesis, admittedly open for twenty years, but which Comte had meant to close very quickly. The reason why Comte had always presented the Plan of 1822 as fundamental is that, beginning with the very title, one finds the two themes that he planned to think through in their relation to one another: science and society. The foremost question is a political one: how should society be reorganized? Science, although present from the beginning, plays a secondary role as the means to achieve the chosen goal. All of Comte’s work aims at the foundation of a discipline in which the study of society will finally become positive, scientific. His idea of sociology is not quite the one we are used to today; but the current meaning of the term ‘positivism’, according to which it is merely a philosophy of science, is even more misleading as a clue to Comte’s thought. Even though the founder of positivism is rightly considered to be one of the great philosophers of science, along with Poincaré and Carnap, his natural place is elsewhere, along with sociologists such as his contemporaries Marx and Tocqueville. Only when the question arises of what distinguishes Comte from the latter does science enter into the picture.