He attended the University of Leipzig as a student of philosophy and natural sciences, but entered officially as a student of medicine when he was seventeen. Lotze's early studies were mostly governed by two distinct interests: the first was scientific, based upon mathematical and physical studies under the guidance of E. H. Weber, Alfred Wilhelm Volkmann, and Gustav Fechner. The other was his aesthetic and artistic interest, which was developed under the care of the speculative theist Christian Hermann Weisse. Weisse also influenced his later anti-psychologistic approach to the historiography of philosophy. He was attracted both by science and by the German idealism of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.