 Lange was born on September 28, 1828 in Wald, near Solingen, Germany. He was the son of a protestant theologian, pastor and professor. Soon after Lange was born, the family moved to Langenberg near Elberfeld and then in 1832 to Duisburg. Lange went to both elementary school and high school in Duisburg. The family moved in 1841 to Zurich so that his father could take up the position as pastor and Professor of Theology that had been withdrawn from David Friedrich Strauss as a result of Strauss’s controversial book The Life of Jesus. Lange continued his high school education in Zurich. Lange also attended lectures at the university for two semesters on philology and theology. He was exposed to both Hegel and Herbart in Zurich. This exposure to Herbart influenced his later interests in education theory, but more importantly led him back to Kant. In 1848 he went to study philology at the University of Bonn under Friedrich Ritschl. Here he also took courses in philosophy, the history of classical German literature, and analytic geometry and calculus. He finished a dissertation on Greek poetry, “Quaestiones metricae”, and was awarded his doctorate in  1851.[1]