It Is The Obstinacy Of Maintaining

This is Voltaire's sardonic description of the philosophy of Dr. Pangloss in Candide (1759), the fictional tutor whose Leibnizian optimism insists that every catastrophe is "all for the best in the best of all possible worlds." The novel subjects this doctrine to a sustained satirical assault: Pangloss is hanged, contracts syphilis, and witnesses the Lisbon earthquake (1755), yet clings to his formula. Voltaire had been personally shaken by the earthquake and wrote a Poem on the Lisbon Disaster (1756) before channeling the same outrage into Candide. The target was specifically Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz's philosophical theodicy, which argued that God's creation was necessarily optimal.