 Kames wrote extensively on revealed and natural theology. As regards the latter, he often has Hume in his sights, particularly Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779), with whose contents Kames was familiar decades before the work’s publication. Hume held that in an inference from effect to cause no more should be assigned to the cause than is sufficient to explain the effect. In particular, if we argue from the existence of the natural world to the existence of God we should ascribe to God only such attributes as are requisite for the explanation of the world. And since the world is imperfect, why not say that we are not constrained by the facts in the natural order to ascribe perfection to God? Kames, on the other hand, holds that there are principles implanted in our nature that permit us to draw conclusions that reason alone does not sanction. If something is a tendency of our nature then we have to rely on it as a source of truth. Invoking just such a tendency Kames affirms that though we see both good and evil around us we do not conclude that the cause of the world must also be a mixture of good and evil: “it is a tendency of our nature to reject a mixed character of benevolence and malevolence, unless where it is necessarily pressed home upon us by an equality of opposite effects; and in every subject that cannot be reached by the reasoning faculty, we justly rely on the tendency of our nature” (Essays, p. 353). In any case Kames sees a world which is predominantly good even though it has ‘a few cross instances’. But the few cross instances might not look so cross, or even at all cross, if we had a fuller perspective, and Kames anticipates the time when that perspective will be granted us.