The two main points of Leibnitzian philosophy are that God is beneficent and that, in creating the world, He created the best possible one. It should be realized that the philosopher did not argue that the world was perfect or that evil was non-existent. What he did mean was that, thanks to God's goodness and His constant concern with his creation, that which is moral and right finally emerges: it is the ultimate reality. It is all a matter of being able to see the Divine plan in its entirety and not to judge by isolated parts. Leibnitz held that nature moves in an orderly way; that its laws are immutable; that any deviation would upset the universe. Matter he defined as an indivisible something. His name for it was monad. All matter, according to his theory, was composed of monads, and these rise on a hierarchical scale from the lowest to the highest. And thus he accounts for the principle of continuity and being in the Great Chain of Being.
By the time he came to write Candide, Voltaire's wide reading and experiences provided him with sufficient reason for rejecting these ideas. The phrase "all is well," a refrain in Candide, voiced again and again by the young hero and Pangloss, his teacher, is scorned; "the best of all possible worlds" becomes a grim joke. The belief that everything forms a chain and that each individual must keep his place in that chain is dismissed as sheer nonsense. Voltaire also rejects the belief that personal evil only contributes to the general good, that human events are wholly in terms of providentialism, and that harmony is pre-established.
