 Collingwood is critical of those philosophers who, like Bradley (1874), bring the presuppositions of natural science to bear upon the study of the historical past. It is not the role of historians to dismiss as false the testimony of historical agents who attest to the occurrence of miracles on the grounds that since nature is uniform and its laws do not change, the miracles past agents attested to could not have happened because their occurrence contravenes the laws of nature. This “positivistic spirit” (IH 1993: 135–36) encourages a judgmental attitude towards the historical sources rather than an attempt to understand their meaning. This is not to say that historians need to believe that miracles happened in order to understand the sources, but rather that understanding the role that belief in the supernatural had for the agents who witnessed to them is more important for the historian than assessing whether belief in the supernatural is true or false: