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Kamile Apalianskaite English 120 Final Exam December 14, 2004 The Optimism and Pessimism in Candide Pangloss and his student Candide maintain that "everything is for the best in this best of all possible worlds", this idea of optimism is a version of the 19th century philosophies of Enlightenment age. Because Voltaire does not accept that a perfect God has to exist; he can afford to mock the idea that the world must be completely good, and he uses satire on this idea throughout the novel. The optimists, Pangloss and Candide, suffer and witness a wide variety of horrors-floggings, rapes, robberies, unjust executions, disease, an earthquake, betrayals, and slavery. These horrors do not serve any apparent greater good, but point only to the cruelty and foolishness of humanity. Pangloss struggles to find justification for the terrible things in the world, but his arguments are simply absurd, as, for example, when he claims that syphilis...

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