 Collingwood’s account of re-enactment certainly implies that the historical past is in principle knowable, that it is possible to mediate reality through the conceptual framework, for example, of the ancient Egyptians or the ancient Greeks. This is not to say that the past can be known in itself, or independently of any conceptual mediation, but that it can be seen from the perspective of past agents, through the categorial framework that mediated their conception of reality. While there are additional epistemic obstacles in the way of understanding agents from a distant past, agents who we cannot engage in a live conversation, knowledge of the past is in principle achievable because understanding past agents is not a radically different task from that of understanding the thoughts of our contemporaries. Historical knowledge, Collingwood says