System

But it’s not just that. No new religious system can completely eliminate the old one by taking its place entirely. Usually the old concepts do not cease to live in the consciousness of the people: they are clothed only in a new form. Every established religion is not the planting of an entirely new plant, but rather the grafting of a new and nobler Bud to the old root. Therefore, no nation can be seen to have fully assimilated the new religion; here is mainly the assimilation of old and new beliefs; the latter are perceived by the popular consciousness in the same way and to the extent that the ground has been prepared for this purpose by the previous religious development. More than a thousand years have passed since the Grand Duke Vladimir baptized pagan Slavs, but pagan concepts and still continue to persist in the minds of the uncultured people.

However, it is easier to establish the principle of gradual development of religion in General, as well as individual religions among different peoples, than to trace the process of this development, starting from ancient times and ending with the modern world; and to establish an exact pattern in the process of this development in the present state of the science of religion is almost impossible. We can only say that here, too, there were those laws of psychic evolution which have their effect in other areas of the life of the human spirit. Of such laws, the following can be specified.

1. The basic law that governs the process of religious development is the law of the unity of the human spirit. The essence of this law consists in the fact that the human spirit at all times, among all peoples and at all stages of their development has manifested and manifests itself in the same way, so that different peoples completely independently of each other come to the same concepts, beliefs and institutions. This law is observed not only in religion, but also in all other areas of human spiritual life. Thus comparative linguistics has established, for example, the fact that the forms of language have developed more or less uniformly among all peoples; there are everywhere etymological changes of the word, declension, and conjugation, and in conjugation the personal pronoun is almost always attached to the verb; the very construction of sentences in all languages is more or less the same.