In another place, Marx contends that "men make their own history, but they make it not of their own accord or under self-chosen conditions, but under given and transmitted conditions. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a mountain upon the brain of the living."[78] Here, again, the influence of the human will is not denied, though its limitations are indicated. This is the application to social man of the theory of limitations of the will commonly accepted as applying to individuals. Man is only a freewill agent within certain sharp and relatively narrow bounds. In a given contingency, I may be "free" to act in a certain manner, or to refrain from so acting. I may take my choice, in the one direction or the other, entirely free, to all appearances, from restraining or compelling influences. Thus, I have acted upon my "will." But what factors formed my will? What circumstances determined my decision? Perhaps fear, or shame, or pride; perhaps tendencies inherited from my ancestors. Engels admits that the economic factor in evolution has sometimes been unduly emphasized. He says: "Marx and I are partly responsible for the fact that the younger men have sometimes laid more stress on the economic side than it deserves. In meeting the attacks of our opponents, it was necessary for us to emphasize the dominant principle denied by them; and we did not always have the time, place, or opportunity to let the other factors which were concerned in the mutual action and reaction get their deserts."[79] In another letter,[80] he says: "According to the materialistic view of history, the factor which is in _last instance_ decisive in history is the production and reproduction of actual life. More than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. But when any one distorts this so as to read that the economic factor is the sole element, he converts the statement into a meaningless, abstract, absurd phrase. The economic condition is the basis; but the various elements of the superstructure,--the political forms of the class contests, and their results, the constitutions,--the legal forms, and also all the reflexes of these actual contests in the brains of the participants, the political, legal, philosophical theories, the _religious views_ ... all these exert an influence on the development of the historical struggles, and, in many instances, determine their form."