That there must be some circumstances present, if there is to be any self-determination on the part of the will, we have already admitted; the freedom of the will implies the presence of more alternatives or motives than one--and we always have the alternative of acting or abstaining from action. But this admission only limits the powers of the will; it does not lessen its liberty. The mind can only choose between the alternatives offered to it; but as long as it has real alternatives it is free. That there must be definite circumstances if there is to be any definite determination of the will is in accordance with the fact that a cause is not some one individual thing, but a sum of conditions, every one of which is necessary to the effect, and the absence of any one of which is enough to prevent the occurrence of the result. It is a vulgar error to single out some one of the conditions (_e.g._ the force acting on a body) and dub it the cause, to the neglect of all the other conditions (_e.g._ the body's mass) which are equally necessary to the effect. It is the error committed by the necessitarian who calls the circumstances the cause, in the case of a determination of the will, and neglects the part played by the will itself. This point of view illustrates the untenability of another objection to the freedom of the will, viz. that it implies that under the same conditions different results can ensue, or, to put it in other words, that without any change in the conditions either this or that consequence may issue. Freedom of the will is thus alleged to be inconsistent with the uniformity of nature, with the law that a cause must produce its effect. The fallacy here obviously lies in assuming that, in a modification of the will, the circumstances by themselves constitute the cause, whereas in point of fact the cause consists of the sum of the conditions, _i.e._, in this case, of the circumstances and the will taken in combination. Alter any one of the conditions, and the effect will be changed--whether the condition which is changed be one of the circumstances or be the will, matters not. Conversely, if under the same circumstances a man acts one way one time and another another, the inference is not that the uniformity of nature has been violated, and that the same conditions produce different effects, but that one of the conditions was different; and as _ex hypothesi_ the circumstances (_i.e._ all the conditions except the will) were in this case the same, it remains that the condition which was different in this case was the will.