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Sobre a afirmação de Leibniz de que este é o melhor dos mundos possíveis, a origem da palavra otimismo e humor judeu.

“Leibniz invented the term “theodicy” [em Essays in Theodicy on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil, 1710] [...] to mean the justification of God’s ways to man – or, as an unbeliever might put it, the art of making excuses on behalf of God. Among other things, Leibniz tried to show that God had created what is, all things considered, ‘the best [optimum] among all possible worlds.’ It is only our imperfect understanding of the universe, Leibniz argued, which prevents us from appreciating this fact, and from seeing that God is therefore innocent of the charge of making a world that is worse than it needs to be. A review of Leibniz’s Theodicy in a French Jesuit journal coined the term optimisme to discribe its striking doctrine that this world is the best that could have been created. Voltaire’s tale [Candide, or Optimism, 1759] than popularised the term.

The philosophical “optimism” is more extreme than what is now ordinarily meant by the word. Nowadays an optimist is merely one who believes that the world is on balance more good than bad, or that it is in the process of improving – not, as Leibniz argued, that it could not possibly be any better. There is also a weaker form of optimism which is more of an attitude or temperament than a belief, and is exemplified in Pollyanna, an American children’s book from the early twentieth century. Pollyana liked to play the ‘just being glad’ game, the aim of which was to ‘find something about everything to be glad about.’ In theory, someone might be rather pessimistic yet also be a Pollyana. One might believe that the world is mostly bad, or that things are getting steadily worse, but still be inclined to play the ‘just being glad’ game, in order to make life more bearable. Jewish humour can have a strain of pessimistic Pollyannaism. – The Dream of Enlightenment, p.184, Anthony Gottlieb