 The Course’s first readers were in Great Britain; the reform projects of the English Radicals had many points in common with the positivist concerns. A reading of the first volumes made enough of an impression on Mill to induce him to write to their author. The correspondence that followed, which lasted from 1841 to 1846, is of considerable philosophical interest. In his first letter, Mill presents himself almost as a follower of Comte and recalls how, some ten years before, it had been Comte’s 1822 work that had liberated him from Bentham’s  influence.[4]  But the tone of the letters, while remaining friendly, changes shortly thereafter. Mill does not hesitate to voice objections to Comte’s conception of biology and his excluding psychology from the sciences. In particular, Mill had strong reservations about Gall’s phrenology, which Comte endorsed, and proposed to replace it with ethology. Their disagreements crystallize around ‘la question féminine’—that is, the status of women in society— where it is possible to see how epistemological and political considerations are linked (Guillin 2007).