The best possible world can still contain evil
the optimist thought this world as good as it could be, while the pessimist thought it as bad as it could be
The historical philosophical formulas are more discriminating than the cartoon definitions Chesterton proceeds to dismiss. Leibniz explicitly concedes the existence of evil and the possibility of a world without it. His claim concerns the comparative perfection of complete possible worlds: an imperfection in one part might contribute to a better whole. Consequently, calling this the best possible world does not mean calling every event good. See the opening objection and reply in the Theodicy's appended Abridgement of the Argument, I, PDF p. 2. The work first appeared in 1710; the witness here is a 2008 teaching adaptation by A. C. Kibel of G. M. Duncan's 1890 English translation, rather than an unmodified early edition.
Schopenhauer actually advances the opposite superlative. In The World as Will and Idea, chapter XLVI, pp. 395–397, he defines possibility by a world's capacity to continue existing and argues that ours survives so precariously that a worse arrangement could not persist. The claim does not require every constituent thing to be bad. This witness is Haldane and Kemp's English translation, vol. III, sixth edition (1909), published after Orthodoxy. It transmits the German supplementary volume first published in 1844 and revised in 1859, as the Cambridge edition's description records; the 1909 witness itself establishes no influence on Chesterton.
Chesterton names neither philosopher here. His target is the popular use of their opposed labels, framed through remembered boyhood bewilderment, rather than a documented exposition of either system. Nevertheless, the distinction matters: his transition from a claim about the world's overall comparative quality to a claim about everything in it is not compulsory. The chapter's stronger challenge comes afterward, when he asks whether allegiance and reform require a relationship to the world deeper than any assessment of its merits.
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