The Great Being sits in the ultimate slot because that is structurally what it is: the final thing, the object of worship, and the term to which everything in the system refers. Comte prescribed how it should be addressed, when, and in what posture, and designed its iconography personally. The choice to depict it as a young woman holding a child is not incidental — Comte held that the feminine represented the sympathetic and altruistic capacities the doctrine most needed to cultivate, and that Catholic imagery had solved the presentation problem correctly. Contemporary critics found this either blasphemous or ridiculous depending on their starting point, and Thomas Huxley's description of positivism as Catholicism minus Christianity has stuck to it ever since.