In English, “Natural History” is a standard, but now somewhat old-fashioned, expression for the family of disciplines such as botany, zoology, ecology, and so on. These disciplines are not necessarily “historical” in the common meaning of that word. That is, they do not necessarily consider the past in their study of animal or plant life. This definition accords well with Nietzsche's discussion of “typology” in §186. Now, if Nietzsche meant only this much by his title, it would already be controversial, since by conjoining “natural” and “morality” he is negating one of the central principles of moral thinking for the previous 150 years. In Hume, there is a distinction between statements that claim that something “is” the case (statements of experience), and statements that claim something “ought” to be the case (moral statements). And, Hume insists, one cannot derive the one from the other. They are entirely different types of statements. Similarly, there is the Kantian distinction between theoretical and practical reason. Theoretical reason has nature in the broadest sense as its proper domain – that is, the type of objects concerning which it can legitimately reason; practical reason has an entirely different domain, that of free (and thus moral) acts. Again, the two domains are distinct, and the two types of reasoning must therefore be carefully distinguished. Nietzsche's title, however, claims that morality belongs within nature.

However, in German, Naturgeschichte also refers directly to study of the development or evolution of life forms, from the past to the present.