So many truths once held as final have ended up falling.

Objects to

In every age, the most rigorous minds held as settled for good truths that what came after overturned: that the Earth stood motionless at the centre of the world, that space and time were the same everywhere and for everyone, that Newton's mechanics had the last word on motion.
These convictions were no idle opinions: they rested on the best evidence of their day, and the most learned believed them safe from any revision.
But if the best-established certainties of yesterday are the acknowledged errors of today, nothing assures us that ours will meet a different fate: the same reasoning, applied to our own age, should make us cautious.

Therefore So no truth, however assured, can declare itself definitively safe: it is the nature of knowledge to be revised one day.

Deepenings

The pessimistic induction

Philosophers of science have given this argument a name: the pessimistic induction. Since most theories once held to be true have ended up abandoned, it would be rash to believe ours exempt from that movement.
One can resist it by distinguishing, within a superseded theory, what was nonetheless kept: Newton is not wrong everywhere, he remains exact within his domain. Progress would thus preserve a core, without yielding any closed certainty for all that.

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