The fundamental error of the theory lies much deeper than appears at first sight. Here too we have the idealistic conception of nature, which refuses to know anything of the causal nexus, because it takes organic forms for the ever-recurring copies of eternal ideas, and in accordance with this platonic sphere of thought confounds the abstractions of the mind with the objective existence of things. This confusion shows itself in Schimper’s doctrine, inasmuch as he takes the geometrical constructions, which he transfers to his plants and which, though they may be highly suitable from his point of view, are nevertheless purely arbitrary, for actual characters of the plants themselves, in other words, takes the subjective connection of the leaves by a spiral line for a tendency inherent in the nature of the plant. Schimper in making his constructions overlooked the fact that, because a circle can be described by turning a radius round one of its extremities, it does not follow that circular surfaces in nature must really have been formed in this way; in other words, he did not see that the geometrical consideration of arrangements in space, useful as it may otherwise be, gives no account of the causes to which they are due. But this was not properly an oversight in Schimper’s case, for he would have scarcely admitted efficient causes in the true scientific sense into his explanations of the form of plants. How far Schimper was from regarding plants as something coming into being in time and according to natural laws, how profoundly he despised the principles of modern natural science is shown in his judgment of Darwin’s theory of descent and of the modern atomic theory, the coarseness of which is the more surprising, because Schimper was a man of refined and even poetic feeling. ‘Darwin’s doctrine of breeding,’ he says, ‘is, as I discovered at once and could not help perceiving more and more after repeated and careful perusal, the most shortsighted possible, most stupidly mean and brutal, much more paltry even than that of the tesselated atoms with which a modern buffoon and hired forger has tried to entertain us.’ Here is the old platonic view of nature flying at modern science; the sternest ‘opposites’ that culture has ever produced.