'Old ideas give way slowly; for they are more than abstract logical forms and categories. They are habits, predispositions, deeply engrained attitudes of aversion and preference. Moreover, the conviction persists - though history shows it to be an hallucination - that all the questions of the human mind has asked are questions that can be answered in terms of the alternatives that the questioins themsleves present. But in fact intellectual progress usually occurs through sheer abandoment of questions together with the alternatives they assume - an abandonment that results from decreasing vitality and interest in their point of view. We do not solve them: we get over them. Old questions are solved by disappearing, evaporating, while new questions corresponding to the changed attitude of endeavour and preference take their place. Doubtless the greatest dissolvent in contemporary thought of old questions, the greatest precipitant of new methods, new intentions, new problems, is the one effected by the scientific revolution that found its climax in the "Origin of Species".'
Quotation from: John Dewey 'Darwin's Influence upon Philosophy', Popular Science Monthly, vol 75, pp90-98, July 1909.
