This is only an attempt to answer such a question as whether this is the best of all possible worlds and construct a more complete comprehension of it’s meaning. The law of opposition creates the potential for this to be the best of all worlds. To imagine another world, which surely must exist among the billions of stars and infinite expanse, is enthralling. In looking at possibilities, it seems a little too naïve to rule out the existence of something better. Where two things exist, one is bound to be greater than the other in some dimension, especially when there is a determining judge. Who can be the judge of worlds? If it is a god that judges between one type or form and another than there is much more to consider. Can a perfect and absolute being create imperfection? Or does a world of perfection include a spectrum of opposites? The answer to the latter question is answered by Pangloss in response to a Familiar of the Inquisition “For the Fall and curse of man necessarily entered into the system of the best of worlds” (Voltaire 11). Before the Fall of Man there was no sin or fallacy in the world, and everything was “good”, but good cannot be good without the contrast of evil. Humans only understand happiness when they have experienced sorrow. Take Candide for example: when he murders the brother of Cunegonde he first feels despair, but later when that action saves his life he calls it the goodness of nature.
“If I had not been so lucky as to run Miss Cunegonde’s brother through the body, I should have been devoured without redemption. But, after all, pure nature is good, since these people, instead of feasting upon my flesh, have shown me a thousand civilities, when they learned I was not a Jesuit” (Voltaire 39).
This world has the potential to be the best of all worlds since mankind possesses the faculty to choose between opposites, or rather, free will. For if everything were only good, then there would be no choice. So it is by the creation of agency that evil is bestowed upon the earth, and only by the existence of evil that this can become the best of all possible worlds. However, whether the world as a whole will ever reach it’s best state, is uncertain. And as Voltaire expresses in Candide that dream is seemingly far from becoming reality. “The villainy of mankind presented itself before his imagination in all its deformity, and his mind was filled with gloomy ideas” (Voltaire 51).