 A crucial event in Fechner’s intellectual development came in 1820 with his reading of Lorenz Oken’s Lehrbuch zur Naturphilosophie (1809). Oken was an admirer of Schelling’s Naturphilosophie, and in his Lehrbuch he set out to provide a systematic exposition of its basic ideas and to reconcile its many opponents (in his “Vorrede” [1809:  v–vi]).[3]  Fechner was excited by Oken’s breathtaking speculations about the whole of nature. From his study of medicine he had become accustomed to see nature as a mechanism; but Oken gave him an exciting new way of conceiving nature as an organic whole. Fechner later said of his first reading of Oken’s book: “A new light seemed to me to illuminate the whole world and the sciences of the world; I was dazzled by it” (Kuntze 1892: 39).