Throughout his working life Meinecke struggled to bring intellectual order into a discussion of the apparently willful and amoral course of historical events. In the first instance that intellectual order is to give us a feeling for how history works. But it will also afford us some moral sense as to how it should work. Meinecke, however, does not intend to arrive at the latter position by diluting or marginalizing the former. In general, he forgoes recourse to a divine will that of itself rationalizes history despite the apparent arbitrariness and brutality of events. Little is to be gained by assuming that God is somewhere (or everywhere) in history, investing everything with his own grace, while a great deal is to be lost should that notion take on—as it frequently does—a nationalist patina. One might believe in God, but making him a player in the game sabotages serious historical analysis. Nor does Meinecke take advantage of the simplistically attractive idea, born of assumed historical objectivity and vulgar Darwinism, that the winners attain a morally enhanced status simply because they have won. Nor does he imagine that there is encoded in events a science of history based on rules that he can winkle out. History is for him not a riddle that can be solved; it is not a disguised natural science. His attitude is neither that of the mystic, nor the militarist, nor the incorrigible positivist. As a result he is compelled to face up to exactly those things that we might think are most likely to sabotage his work. Nonetheless, he attempts rigorously to embed both the arbitrary and the cult of national (or personal) self-interest into the historical discussion in a manner that reflects their actual potent place in the course of events. Even more than this, he does not—at least, not in many cases—treat these elements as discrete, as somehow independent of the positive achievements through which he has lived.