"But it was Hegel, among all German thinkers, who had the deepest and most enduring impact on Western thought and identity. It is often forgotten that his work was a reaction against the Romantics' passion for India's past. He borrowed Indian ideas (such as monism) while debating Indologists to argue against the value of Indian civilization. He posited that the West, and only the West, was the agent of history and teleology. India was the 'frozen other', which he used as a foil to define the West.... Hegel has a peculiarly phobic and blind reaction to Asia in general and India in particular. He laboriously criticizes Sanskrit and Indian civilization, arguing with European Indologists with the aim of assimilating some ideas (such as absolute idealism) into his own philosophy while postulating India as the inferior other in order to construct his theory of the West. Asia's place in history is as an infant, whereas the West is mature and everyone's eventual destination."