"Nothing happens by itself, but everything tends to happen through human action," postulated Herodotus, the father of historiography. The cultural philosopher Theodor Lessing describes in this volume his concept of voluntaristic philosophy of history, according to which it is only through an act of will that humans assign a meaningful order and thus significance to the inherently meaningless and chaotic events. Lessing opposed the notion of objective causality, necessity, and the laws of history. This is a carefully revised reprint of the second edition from 1921.