I know; you don’t consider it impossible. That’s the trouble with you; you don’t consider anything… — Keith Laumer

Foster shook his head. “The inherent inertia of the human mind,” he said. “How it fights to resist new ideas.”

I’m arguing with myself and I can’t tell who’s winning.

“It’s a failing of your culture,” Foster said, “that hypothesis becomes dogma almost overnight. You’re too close to your Neolithic, when the blind acceptance of tribal lore had survival value. Having learned to evoke the fire god from sticks, by rote, you tend to extend the principal to all ‘established facts.’”