 This distinction between science and history has its origins in 19th-century German academe, which distinguished between "Naturwissenschaften" (the sciences) and "Geisteswissenschaften" (the humanities), or between "Gesetzwissenschaften" (the law - giving sciences) and "Geschichtswissenschaften" (history).Generally, "Naturwissenschaften" and "Gesetzwissenschaften" refer to the study of phenomena that are governed by objective natural laws, while the latter terms in the two oppositions refer to those phenomena that have to mean only in terms of human perception or experience.In 1884, Kantian philosopher Wilhelm Windelband coined the terms nomothetic and idiographic to describe these two divergent approaches.