But on a closer examination it will be found that when the necessitarian attempts to invalidate our consciousness of alternative power by the application of the causational argument he adroitly shifts his ground. He assumes another proposition, which is neither equivalent to the above axiom, nor in itself axiomatic and self-evident, nor justifiably assumed without proof. McCosh says "the doctrine of necessity is founded on the intellectual intuitions of man's mind, which lead us, in mental as in material phenomena, to anticipate the _same_ effects to follow the _same_ causes"[531]--that is, every cause is inalternative or unipotent; one effect, and only one can follow. Now that a given phenomenon must have a cause is one assertion; that the _same_ cause will again and forever produce the _same_ effect is another. The first is an axiom, the second is an induction. That "every event must have a cause" is a rational intuition. That "like causes will produce always like effects" is a generalization from our limited experience, and on a further analysis will be found to apply only to our cognitions of the _material_ universe. It is grounded simply on what we know empirically of the uniformity of nature. Now we have no _à priori_ intuitive conviction of the uniformity of nature. As the result of maturer thought, McCosh admits this in his work on the "Intuitions of the Mind:" "It is vain to speak of the belief in the uniformity of nature as a self-evident, a necessary, or a universal truth" (page 276). It is perfectly conceivable that the world might have been so constituted that there should have been no regularity in the succession of events. The causes of all the events in nature might have been _supernatural_, and consisted in the immediate free volitions of the Deity, or subordinate angelic agencies.[532] They might have been all "miraculous," and yet the true law of causality would not have been violated, or in any way invalidated. And so when man, in the exercise of his free alternative power, produces a new succession of events in physical nature, or moves disorder and ἀνομία into the moral sphere, this is no way inconsistent with the axiom that "every event has a cause." "In our very definition of freedom of will we assume in the volitional sphere the inapplicability of the maxim that 'like causes ever and always produce like effects.' We assume that _either_ one of several effects is legitimate from the _same_ cause. And while we admit that in non-volitional causation the law that 'every event must have a cause' means that every event must have its own peculiar cause, adequate for itself alone, in volitional causation an event may have a cause adequate either for it or for other event; and whichever event exists, the _demands of the laws of causation are completely satisfied_."[533]