 Mill had been engaged in a pen-friendship with Auguste Comte, the founder of positivism and sociology, since Mill first contacted Comte in November 1841.Comte's "sociologie" was more an early philosophy of science than we perhaps know it today, and the "positive" philosophy aided in Mill's broad rejection of Benthamism.As a nonconformist who refused to subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England, Mill was not eligible to study at the University of Oxford or the University of Cambridge.