§ 2.—GEIJER AND WALLIN. 367 
contact with his three famous contemporaries, F. M. 
Franzén (1772—1847), the pious and sympathetic Bishop 
of Hernosand; Esaias Tegnér (1782—1846), Bishop of 
Vexio, the most popular poet of Sweden, and the still more 
important Johan Olof Wallin (1779—1839), 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 1), 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- 
tigion, and ‘‘only for a religious person is there a