Various issues will be clarified, and some disagreements
will be resolved on closer scrutiny of the nature and
quality of our awareness. The distinction between the
unconsciousness of sleep and, for example, the critical
awareness of threading a needle are familiar enough. But
there are many levels of mental activity. "You are not
paying attention (to me)," is a most familiar complaint.

The imagination of the child who has not learned to distinguish
fantasy from reality is most easily distracted and exploited. 
Even for the mature mind, the distinction between what is
imagined and what is real remains problematic: if only because
everything that is real, in order to be perceived, requires also
to be imagined; furthermore, the products of the imagination have
a reality which in some respects is indistinguishable from the
reality that is perceived prior to the exercise of the imagination.

To phrase it differently: the perception of reality is attended
by imagination that differs from occasion to occasion and from
person to person in degree and in quality. For the uncritical
imagination the "alien" from outer space is as real as is the
fireman from Waltham or Arlington. For the uncritical imagination,
the dinosaurs of 200 million years ago are as real as the deer
that I see grazing under the apple trees of the lawn fifty feet
from the porch on which I sit. For the uncritical imagination,
the Greek soldiers who fought and died at Thermopylae are as
real as my patient who happens to die of a stroke or a heart
attack in my office.

For me, that which I see or hear is more compelling by far
than that which I imagine. History is essentially imagination;
that is why the historical event is not as real to me as the
event which is present to my eyes or ears. The "reality"
attributable to the inferences of archeology, paleontology,
evolutionary biology, cosmology and geology are unavoidably
contingent on imagination. All of these are historical disciplines.
What they tell me is less real than what I glean from nature with
my own perception.

Evolutionary biology is history, and as such is Geisteswissenschaft
and is under the same constraints as govern all other history.
And not only evolutionary biology, - geology, cosmology, paleontology,
archeology are all of them historical disciplines, and are all
under the same constraints.

My surmise was corroborated by an article that I found when
in an attempt to enlighten myself about paleontology, I was
surfing the Internet: 
O'Hara, Robert J. "Homage to Clio, or Toward an Historical Philosophy
for Evolutionary Biology" Syst. Zoology 37(2):142-155, 1988