The tendency of the Western teacher to mistake the externals for the essentials of education, and to measure educational progress in terms of the "appearance of things," gives rise to many misconceptions, one of the principal of which is the current confusion between information and knowledge. To generate knowledge in his pupils is a legitimate end of the teacher's ambition. In schools and other "academies" it tends to become the chief, if not the sole, end; and, things being what they are, the teacher may be pardoned for regarding it as such. But what is knowledge? The vulgar confusion between knowledge and information is the accepted answer to this question. But the answer is usually given before the question has been seriously considered. One who allowed himself to reflect on it, however briefly or cursorily, would quickly realise that it is possible to have intimate and effective knowledge of a subject without being able to impart any information about it. Successful action, as in arts, crafts, games, sports, and the like, must needs have subtle and accurate knowledge behind it; but the possessor of such knowledge is seldom able to impart it with any approach to lucidity. On the other hand, it frequently happens that one who has a retentive memory is able to impart information glibly and correctly, without possessing any real knowledge of the subject in question. The truth is that knowledge, which may perhaps be provisionally defined as a correct attitude towards one's environment, has almost as wide a range as that of human nature itself. At one end of the scale we have the quasi-animal instinct which governs successful physical action. At the other end we have the knowledge, of which, and of the possession of which, its possessor is clearly, conscious. Between these extremes there is an almost infinite series of strata, ranging through every conceivable degree of subconsciousness. The knowledge that is real and effective is absorbed into one or more of the subconscious strata, from which it gradually ascends, under the influence of attention and reflection, towards the more conscious levels, gaining, as it ascends, in scope and outlook what it may possibly lose in subtlety and nearness to action. When knowledge, after passing upwards through many subconscious strata, rises to what I may call the surface-level of consciousness, it is ready, on occasion, to give itself off as information. This exhalation from the surface of consciousness is genuine information, not to be confounded with knowledge, to which it is related as the outward to the inward state, still less to be confounded with that spurious information which floats, as we shall presently see, like a film on the surface of the mind, meaning nothing and indicating nothing except that it has been artificially deposited, and that in due season it will be skimmed off, if the teacher's hopes are fulfilled, for the delectation of an examiner.