Part 22

The radical faculties belong entirely to Love; the branchial to knowledge and industry.

It is imperative upon us to follow the determination of the radical faculties, and to modify the branchial always in obedience to the radical.

It is the child, or the Love-Spirit in the child, that we must obey, and not suffer the Parents or any one else to divert us from it.

Good is not to be determined by man's wishes, but Good must originate and determine the wish.

The Preceptor must watch attentively for every new exhibition of the child's radical faculties, and obey them as divine laws.

We must in every movement consider that it is the Infinite perfecting the finite.

All that is unnecessary in the external must be kept from the child.

The Preceptor's duty is, as far as possible, to remove every hindrance out of the child's way.

The closer he keeps the child to the Spirit, the less it will want of us, or anyone else.

The child has an inward, sacred, and unchangeable nature; which nature is the Temple of Love. This nature only demands what it will give, if properly attended to, viz.: Unfettered Liberty.

The Love Germs can alone germinate with Love. Light and Life are but conditions of Love. Divine capacities are made by love alone.

Love education is primarily a passive one; and, secondarily, an active one. To educate the radical faculties is altogether a new idea with Teachers at present.

The parental end must be made much more prominent than it has been.

The conceptive powers want much more purification than the perceptive; and it is only as we purify the conceptive that we shall get the perceptive clear.

It is the essential conceptive powers that tinge all the consequences of the exterior conceptive powers.

We have double conceptions, and double perceptions; we are throughout double beings; and claim the universal morality, as well as the personal.

We must now educate the universal moral faculties, as before we have only educated the personal moral faculties.

It is in the universal moral faculties that the laws reside; until these laws are developed, we remain lawless beings.

The personal moral faculties cannot stand without the aid of the universal moral faculties, any more than the branches can grow without the roots.

Education, to be decidedly religious, should reach man's universal faculties, those faculties which contain the laws that connect man with his maker.

These reflections seem to me to be worthy of consideration. Should any of them strike you as worth while to make an observation upon, I shall be happy to hear it. Suggestions are always valuable, as they offer to the mind the liberty of free activity. The work we are engaged in is too extensive and important, to lose any opportunity of gaining information.

The earlier I receive your reply, the better.

I am, dear Sir, yours faithfully,

J. P. GREAVES.

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."