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Mill had a famous and complex relationship with Comte. As Comte entered his later, "religious", phase, Mill's admiration cooled, as the oft-told story goes, and he worked at distancing himself from Positivism. Nevertheless, their opinions often overlapped, and appeal to the one often meant assent to the views of the other — a point obscured in the later nineteenth century by European nationalism. Germans roundly denounced "French Positivism", but not infrequently took over much the same reasoning in Millian form. Durkheim, who loyally held that Comte was the largest source of his methodological inspiration and was portrayed by his French associates as "a real heir" of Comte (Levy-Bruhl, 1903, p. 359), devoted more of the Rules to issues that arise in connection with Mill than to those that arise with Comte. In a sense, Mill's A System of Logic was a completion of Comte's project, for although Comtean formulations were often sufficiently precise to deal with certain topics, particularly the sciences' "usual end of obtaining a rational prevision" (Comte, 1858, p. 370), they were vague with respect to others, particularly those pertaining to the logic of experimental reasoning.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-017-3461-5_3

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