 Collingwood’s philosophy of history is a sustained attempt to delineate the subject matter of history and why this subject matter cannot be captured by adopting the methods of natural science. He is critical of the argument, advanced by John Stuart Mill that the distinction between the human and the natural sciences is merely a distinction in the degree of accuracy that can be reached in their respective domains of inquiry. In his System of Logic (1843), Mill argued that the subject matter of psychology differs from that of the natural sciences because psychology studies human actions. Yet the method by which the psychologist studies human actions is the same (inductive) method that is operative in natural science. Psychologists predict human behaviour in the same way in which natural scientists predict natural events, by inferring it from certain antecedent conditions and empirical generalisations. While the generalisations of psychologists invoke psychological rather than natural laws, the method is the same. The difference between psychology and natural science lies in the fact that the predictions of psychologists unlike, say, those of astronomers are imprecise. Such a difference, for Mill, is insufficiently robust to support the claim for disunity in the sciences. The most accurate way of drawing the distinction between psychology and astronomy is not to deny that psychology is a (natural) science, but to acknowledge that there are two kinds of natural sciences, those which are precise (like astronomy) and those which are imprecise (like psychology). According to Mill’s way of drawing the distinction psychology is, like tidology and meteorology, an inexact (natural) science. The contrast (for Mill) is therefore not between two kinds of sciences in the Latin sense of scientia, meaning two distinct kinds of knowledge, but between different kinds of natural sciences: exact and inexact. Collingwood rejected Mill’s suggestion that the reconstruction of the thoughts of historical agents is a past-directed empirical psychology. The study of mind is, as we saw earlier, a normative or criteriological endeavour because to understand past agents historically is to understand the conceptual connections they made by reconstructing their thought-context. The subject matter of history, Collingwood claims, is not merely human actions but res gestae. These