 It is unclear, however, that appeal to the essential features of events successfully deals with the problem. After all, what if, had Suzy not stolen a cake, the cake she would have bought was a Bath bun and not the coconut cake she actually stole? (She really wanted a cake but didn’t have enough money for the coconut cake.) And in any case, Lewis’s own official view is that in supposing a putative cause c absent we ‘imagine that c is completely and cleanly excised from history, leaving behind no fragment or approximation of itself’ (2004a: 90). So we don’t appear to be able to recover the truth of the claim that Suzy’s theft of the cake was not a cause of her subsequent illness. Moreover, Lewis’s 2000 theory of causation as influence abandons the distinction between the essences of events to which the above response appealed: we have various alterations of the theft of the coconut cake (c) – including the purchase of a coconut cake and the theft of a Bath bun, for example – some of which would have resulted in an alteration of the effect e (Suzy’s illness) and some of which would not have. The degree of influence of c on e either is or is not sufficient to make it the case that c was a cause of e; either way, ‘Suzy’s theft of the coconut cake was a cause of her illness’ comes out either true or false independently of context, which – according to the contextualist – is the wrong result. (The invariantist, however, might insist that there is no real problem here. ‘Because she stole a coconut cake’ would be an inappropriate response to the question ‘Why is Suzy ill?’ if the request comes from the doctor, who is not interested in how she procured the cake; but it would be an appropriate response in the context of a discussion about, say, Suzy getting her comeuppance from her shoplifting habit.)