  Among Buber’s early philosophical influences were Kant’s Prolegomena, which he read at the age of fourteen, and Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. Haunted by the seeming infinity of space and time, Buber found solace in Kant’s understanding that space and time are mere forms of perception that structure the  manifold of sensory impressions. At the same time, Kant allows to think of being as transcending the pure forms of human intellection. Buber’s mildly religious reading of Kant, which seems both conventional and autodidactic, seems to have been untrammeled by the debates between the various schools of neo-Kantianism that developed since the 1860’s and came to dominate much of the academic teaching of philosophy across Germany until the First World War. From Nietzsche and Schopenhauer Buber learned the importance of the will, the power to project oneself heroically into a fluid and malleable world, and to do so according to one’s own measure and standard. Though Buber’s philosophy of dialogue is a decisive step away from Nietzschean vitalism, the focus on lived experience and embodied human wholeness, as well as the prophetic tone and aphoristic style Buber honed from early on, persisted in his subsequent writings. Between 1896 and 1899 he studied the history of art, German literature, philosophy, and psychology in Vienna, Leipzig (1897/98), Berlin (1898/99), and Zurich (1899). In Vienna he absorbed the oracular poetry of Stefan George, which influenced him greatly, although he never became a disciple of George. In Leipzig and Berlin he developed an interest in the ethnic psychology (Völkerpsychologie) of Wilhelm Wundt, the social philosophy of Georg Simmel, the psychology of Carl Stumpf, and the lebensphilosophische approach to the humanities of Wilhelm Dilthey. In Leipzig he attended meetings of the Society for Ethical Culture (Gesellschaft für ethische Kultur), then dominated by the thought of Lasalle and Tönnies.