 The historical past is the past understood historically, i.e., from the perspective of certain presuppositions, presuppositions that give rise to certain kinds of questions, questions that are distinctive of historical inquiry and differ from those of natural science. The past in so far as it is understood historically (the historical past) is therefore not the same thing as the past as it is studied by a natural scientist. Just as the term “cause” needs to be disambiguated to avoid conceptual confusion, so does the term “past” because it means different things to the humanistically oriented historiographer as it does, for example, to a geologist: