The idea which transcends and corrects alike the individualistic and supra-individualistic views of history is the idea of history as rational. History is made by individuals: but individuality is nothing but the concreteness of the universal, and every individual action, simply because it is individual, is supra-individual. Neither the individual nor the universal exists as a distinct thing: the real thing is the one single course of history, whose abstract aspects are individuality without universality and universality without individuality. This one course of history is coherent in all its many determinations, like a work of art which is at the same time manifold and single, in which every word is inseparable from the rest, every shade of colour related to all the others, every line connected with every other line. On this understanding alone history can be understood. Otherwise it must remain unintelligible, like a string of words without meaning or the incoherent actions of a madman.
History then is the work neither of Fate nor of Chance but of the necessity which is not determination and the liberty which is not chance. And since the religious view, that history is the work of God, has this advantage and superiority over the others, that it introduces a cause for history other than fate or chance, and therefore not properly speaking a cause at all, but a creative activity, a free and intelligent mind, it is natural that out of gratitude to this higher view no less than by the suitability of the language we should be led to give to the rationality of history the name of God who rules and governs all things, and to call it the Divine Providence. In so naming it, we at the same time purge the title of its mythical dross which debased God and his providence afresh into a fate or a chance. Thus providence in history, in this final logical form, has double value as a criticism of individual illusions, when they come forward as the entire and only reality of history, and as a criticism of divine transcendence. And we may say that this is the point of view which always has been and always is adopted, as if instinctively, without the profession of an explicit theory, by all minds naturally gifted with that particular faculty which we call the historic sense.