 Even though each new edition of Mill’s System of Logic saw fewer references to the Course than the previous one (in the first edition there had been more than a hundred), Comte’s influence on Mill ran deep, the extent to which is greatly underestimated today (Raeder 2002). Mill’s Autobiography is quite explicit on this point as Comte figures much more prominently in it than Tocqueville with whom Mill had been in contact for a longer time. Conversely, Mill contributed much to the spreading of positivism. His book on Comte (Mill 1865) enjoyed considerable success, and Mill himself was sometimes considered a  positivist.[5]