As William James saw, optimism involves confidence that we can act well, that our projects can succeed, and that they can make the world a better place or adapt it to one's needs or ends. Leibniz held that a perfect and benevolent God would inevitably create the best of all possible worlds. His response to the problem that the world contains natural evils was that a world without such evils would inevitably display other imperfections; for example, it might lack the elegant law-governed structure or the great natural variety of this one — Professor Christopher Hookway