The imitative impulse tends to this, because men most easily imitate what their minds are best prepared for,--what is like the old, yet with the inevitable minimum of alteration; what throws them least out of the old path, and puzzles least their minds.
Bagehot discusses how people tend to imitate familiar ideas with minimal changes.
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More from Walter Bagehot
He gave an excellent moral example to his contemporaries, but he is an instance of those whose good dies with them, while their evil lives after them.
He could have found the truth as a statesman just as he found it when a judge; but he never did find it.
Savages waste away before modern civilisation; they seem to have held their ground before the ancient.
But the Jewish advantage never did so; beginning in religion, contrary to a thousand analogies, it remained religious.
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