AN ATTEMPT AT SOME REFLECTIONS ON OPTIMISM (1759)

Summary

Now that an appropriate concept of God has been formed, there is perhaps nothing more natural than the thought: if God chooses, he chooses only what is best. It was said of Alexander that he thought that he had done nothing as long as there was still something left for him to do. The same thing can be said with infinitely greater propriety about the most benevolent and most powerful being of all. Leibniz did not think that he was saying anything new when he maintained that this world was the best of all possible worlds, or, which amounts to the same thing, that the totality of all that God has created outside Himself, was the best which could possibly have been created. What was new was the employment to which Leibniz put this principle. He employed it, namely, to cut the knot, so difficult to untie, of the difficulties relating to the origin of evil. An idea which is so easy and so natural, and which is eventually repeated so often as to become a common platitude and a source of disgust to people of more refined taste, cannot continue an object of respect for long. Where is the honour in thinking like the common herd, or in maintaining a proposition which is so easy to prove? Subtle errors are a stimulus to one's self-love, which takes delight in the sense of its own strength. Obvious truths, on the other hand, are apprehended with such ease and with an understanding so common that in the end their fate is the fate of those songs which become intolerable as soon as they start to ring out from the mouths of the common masses. To put the matter briefly: it is often the case with some of the things we know that they are highly esteemed, not because they are right, but because they have been gained at a cost.