There is a complex process in which elements of objective knowledge and social imagination intertwine. The images of India in
the work of European philosophers and their evolution over the course of the last two centuries illustrate very clearly this particular union of objective knowledge and the imagination.

When, at the end of the 18th century and beginning of the 19th century, the scholarly disciplines which deciphered the still unknown Indian languages of Sanskrit and Pali, and when, in the second half of the 19th century the
“science of religion” was developed, the doctrines of India did not simply become subjects for new learning. These systems of thought aroused in European philosophers hopes and fears in which mythical constructs relating to Europe itself can be located. Images of the Other, it is well known, speak to us also, probably most of all, about ourselves.