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a. GEIJER AND WALLIN. 367
Contact with his three famous contemporaries, F. M.
Franzen (1772 1847), the pious and sympathetic Bishop
of Hernosand; Esaias Tegner (17821846), Bishop of
Vexio, the most popular poet of Sweden, and the still more
important Johan Olof Wallin (17791839), at first bishop
in connection with the Order of the Seraphim, and then
Archbishop of Upsala.
Geijer was a man of a good Austrian family which can
be traced back to the thirteenth century. Two members of
this family were invited into Sweden by Gustavus
Adolphus in 1620, in order to direct the work of mining, to
which he rightly attached so much importance.
It cannot be doubted that this fact inspired Geijer with
an interest in the past, and that his German extraction en
abled him more readily than his contemporaries to take an
independent point of view. He was familiar with foreign
literature, and passed from youthful admiration of
Rousseau and Schiller to that of Shakespeare and Goethe.
A journey to England, where he spent a year (1809 1810)
as tutor to a young Von Schinkel, had a great effect in
enlarging his mind and developing his principles as a
thinker. The greater part of Geijer s life was passed as
professor at Upsala, and he was wise enough to refuse a
bishopric which was twice offered him, saying: "You
might perhaps get a blameless and mediocre bishop, but
all would be over with Eric Gustaf Geijer." He was never
in holy orders, though he had once seriously thought of
it as a career. In the essay already referred to he fought
with weapons taken from German philosophy and
especially from Schelling against the conception of re
ligion which prevailed in the period of rationalism. In
philosophical language he asserted that the fundamental
fact of experience is not the ego and the non-ego (I and
not I), but
"
I and thou
"
the
"
two self-luminous be
ings
"
to which John Henry Newman referred in a famous
passage of his Apologia. His principle was that history
was a continuous manifestation of God founded on re
ligion, and "only for a religious person is there a
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