At age 10, when we cry, mom may laugh at us. Or she may cry in order to try to cause us to act in a particular way. The student of history, or social science, does not study the cause of sense experience as such. These may have effects that can be sensed. But they also may have effects that are unobservable or even deliberately concealed from the view of the observer.
All people have instincts and most have bad habits.
In studying history, we cannot avoid also studying such phenomena since the two are, in the present state of knowledge, inseparable. I could go on to discuss the methods of studying distinctly human action and the necessary a priori assumptions one must make to study history. Since an excellent discussion of this already exists, however, I shall move on. The second step in this project is to define ideas. In this discussion, I have described ideas about distinctly human phenomena and ideas about phenomena that are not distinctly human.