Old ideas give way slowly for they are more than abstract logical forms and categories, they are habits, predispositions, and deeply ingrained attitudes of aversion and preference. Moreover the conviction persists, though history shows it to be a hallucination, that all questions that the human mind has asked are questions that can be answered in terms of the alternatives that the questions themselves present.

But in fact intellectual progress usually occurs through shear abandonment of the questions and the alternatives that they assume, abandonment that results from their decreasing vitality and change of urgent interest. We do not solve them we get over them.—John Dewey.