 Gödel was compelled to this view of L by the  Leibnizian[18]  idea that, rather than the universe being “small,” that is, one with the minimum number of sets, it is more natural to think of the set theoretic universe as being as large as  possible.[19]This  idea would be reflected in his interest in maximality principles, i.e., principles which are meant to capture the intuitive idea that the universe of set theory is maximal in the sense that nothing can be added; and in his conviction that maximality principles would eventually settle statements like the CH. As Gödel put it in a letter to Ulam in the late 1950s, about a maximality principle of von Neumann: