"Nothing happens by itself; rather, 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 the human being, through an act of will, that assigns a meaningful and orderly course to the inherently meaningless and chaotic events, thus giving them significance. Lessing opposed the notion of objective causality, necessity, and the lawfulness of history. This is a carefully revised reprint of the second edition from 1921.