History, it is said, stops with the present. Because historical methodology depends on the use of written records and related evidence, and because there are no records of the future, the historical process was long considered only as one in which an infinite variety of factors, some of them unmeasurable and others unforeseeable, and all liable to be affected by human free-will intervention or by chance, created a future that was inevitably unique and discrete, and therefore unpredictable
