 These two sides of Fechner represent conflicting currents of his age. Growing up in the early nineteenth century, Fechner was exposed to the rise of romanticism and the growth of the empirical sciences. He was an early student of romantic Naturphilosophie, the writings of Schelling, Oken and Steffans, which were Faustian attempts to grasp nature as a whole. But he was also a student of physics and physiology at the University of Leipzig, where his mentors, Alfred Volkmann and Ernst Weber, were at the forefront of experimental work on the psychology of perception. Fechner learned early that the speculative methods of Naturphilosophie were insufficient to yield careful and substantive results in science; despite that, he never lost the longing for unity, the desire for a complete vision of things, which is characteristic of Naturphilosophie.