The Urpflanze was Goethe's idea of an archetypal or model plant. The Urpflanze was formulated by the conceptual abstraction of all the features Goethe considered characteristic of all plants. The Urpflanze governed the structure of all plants by virtue of its existence, functioning as a kind of ontologically generative paradigm. Goethe was not a fan of Linnaeus and the Linnean model of classification, but the notion of the Urpflanze nevertheless reinforced Linnean epistemologies: that nature is inherently ordered, that this order has the power to govern individual instances, and that it is ultimately intuitable to the human mind.