 Lange’s work was seen as a potent response to the intellectual and practical crises provoked by the materialist positions dominant in Germany in the mid-19th century. Along with the neo-Kantians including Cohen and Windelband, Lange saw the positions of Czolbe, Vogt, Büchner, and other materialists as (justifiably) undermining long-held religious and metaphysical positions. Drawing on his views on practical pedagogy and workers’ rights, Lange developed a form of “socialist Darwinism” (Weikart 1999) and defended a Kantian “ethical standpoint of the ideal” to replace what he saw as religious and metaphysical dogmatism.