  Modes, then, are distinct and provisionally coherent kinds of knowledge. In Experience and Its Modes, Oakeshott aims to identify the presuppositions in terms of which a mode can be made coherent and distinguished from other modes. Modal distinctions are categorial. A categorial distinction is one of kind rather than degree. Philosophers have disagreed about whether the identified kinds are natural (ontological) or conceptual (epistemological): the former are categories of being (Aristotle), the latter categories of understanding (Kant). Philosophers have also disagreed about whether a categorial scheme must be exhaustive and fixed or, alternatively, can be open and mutable. The modes that Oakeshott identifies in Experience and Its Modes—history, science, and practice, to which he later added “poetry” (aesthetic experience)—can from one angle be seen as epistemological categories, not ontological ones. But from another angle the distinction between being and knowing does not make sense (Hegel). There can be no absolute difference between what a thing is and how it is conceived in a particular context because there are no “things in themselves” in the Kantian sense that are independent of thought. And though the modes are mutually exclusive, Oakeshott does not think that they form a closed set. The modes he identifies are intellectual constructions that have appeared in the course of human experience. This suggests that they could change or even disappear, and that new modes might emerge. But here we must distinguish between a mode and its instantiation. History was a possible form of thinking before anyone started to think historically and would remain a possibility even if human beings were to cease thinking historically. 