Results Details

And such conceptual reformulations, as is well known, are difficult, rare, and, oddly, often unwelcome. - (Swordsmen of Gor, Chapter 2, Sentence #96)

The caste of Physicians, long ago, construed ageing as a disease, the "drying and withering disease," and not as an inevitability or fatality, and so set to work to effect, so to speak, its cure. Scientists of Earth, as I understand it, are only now beginning to sniff about the edges of this problem. A radical shift in perspective, of course, is necessary. And such conceptual reformulations, as is well known, are difficult, rare, and, oddly, often unwelcome. Major truths, no matter what the evidence in their favor, are often, in the beginning, denied, then ridiculed, then battled, and then, if the cultural situation permits, and insufficient numbers of the heretics, or proponents, of the new views are imprisoned or executed, grudgingly accepted, and then, later, hailed as obvious, and those originally most adamant in their opposition, perhaps having run out of penitentiaries and firewood, will claim credit for the discoveries to which they have so reluctantly succumbed. Indeed, can they not find passages in their texts which hint of those very secrets, and other passages which allude to them in now-transparent metaphors? Claims to the effect, say, that ageing is, or is not, a disease are at least cognitive. One can be right or wrong about them. - (Swordsmen of Gor)