In 1842, Mr. Alcott visited England with the aim to confer with the philanthropists and educators there, to exchange views, collect information, and gather hints on the subject of literary and social methods. Mr. Greaves was dead; but the living friends of the "First Philosophy" received him with hearty respect and joy, introduced him to men of literary and philanthropic eminence, and made his arrival the occasion of meetings for conversation on the religious, social and ethical questions of the day. The meetings were held mostly at an institution managed on his own methods and called by his own name, the school of Mr. Wright at Alcott House, Ham, Surrey. Strange people were some of those he met, Communists, Alists (deriving their name from Alah--the Hebrew name for God), Syncretic Associationists, Pestalozzians, friends and advocates of self-supporting institutions, experimental Normal Schools, Hydropathic and Philosophical Associations, Health Unions, Philansteries, Utopias of every description, new social arrangements between the sexes, new devices for making marriage what it should be. The London _Morning Chronicle_, of July 5th, contained the following advertisement: "Public Invitation.--An open meeting of the friends to human progress will be held to-morrow, July 6th, at Mr. Wright's, Alcott House School, Ham Common, near Richmond, Surrey, for the purpose of considering and adopting means for the promotion of the great end, when all who are interested in human destiny are earnestly urged to attend. The chair taken at three o'clock, and again at seven, by A. Bronson Alcott, Esq., now on a visit from America. Omnibuses travel to and fro, and the Richmond steamboat reaches at a convenient hour." The call brought together some sixteen or twenty persons, from various distances; one a hundred miles; another a hundred and fifty. "We did not find it easy to propose a question sufficiently comprehensive to unfold the whole of the fact with which our bosoms labored," writes a private correspondent of the "Dial." "We aimed at nothing less than to speak of the instauration of spirit, and its incarnation in a beautiful form. When a word failed in extent of meaning, we loaded the word with new meaning. The word did not confine our experience, but from our own being we gave significance to the word. Into one body we infused many lives, and it shone as the image of divine or angelic, or human thought. For a word is a Proteus, that means to a man what the man is."