   Thinking that is involved in acting is one such mode, which Oakeshott calls “practice”. Another is “history”, by which he means neither “the notional grand total of all that has ever happened” nor some part of it, whose makers are the participants in the occurrences that constitute it, but rather a distinct kind of inquiry into and understanding of events. Because events are not given but must be inferred from what the historian treats as evidence, history is made by the historian (OH 1–2). It is, moreover, an inquiry that aims to account for past events as intelligible outcomes of antecedent events. In contrast to history, understood in this way, “science” as a mode is defined by its search for regularities that can account for the occurrence of repeatable events and for ways to express these regularities as relationships between quantities. This way of distinguishing between history and science locates Oakeshott in the tradition of German Neo-Kantian of the previous generation, Windelband and Rickert especially, in which the Naturwissenschaften and Geisteswissenschaften were treated as distinct epistemological forms. History and science are both inherently explanatory, but the kinds of explanations they provide are different. Genuine history is also distinguished from ideas about the past that are shaped by current practical concerns (the “practical past”). The same holds for science: as a mode of inquiry, science is different from the practical application of scientific knowledge. From this perspective, we might see engineering as a practical discipline rather than a scientific one. 