404 On Technical Education . [July, 
terms — information , knowledge, and science , as much confu- 
sion of thought prevails amongst the public in general, 
with respect to the meaning of these and other terms 
which have to be employed in discussing education 
questions. 
The accumulation of stray particulars by means of the 
memory we term information ; in every stage of life we 
are constantly acquiring information ; but it is the pre- 
dominating mental process that is in operation in childhood, 
and amongst the uncivilised and uneducated. 
When information has been appropriated by us and 
thoroughly matured ; in other words, when it has become a 
part of our own intelligence, or, to use Mr. Herbert Spencer’s 
expression, when it has been turned into faculty ; when, in 
short, we can reason about it and make use of it, we desig- 
nate it knowledge. 
Every human being, the uneducated, as well as the 
educated, reasons ; but the uneducated reasons only about 
particulars, from like to like ; he cannot, like the educated, 
discover that what is true of one thing is equally true of 
many other things ; he is not, in fact, able, except in very 
simple cases, to generalise, — that is, draw a general law 
from particular cases ; and it is by generalisation that the 
laws of Nature are learned from observation and experiment. 
Every human being before the time of Newton had observed 
that heavy bodies fall to the earth ; but that great Philo- 
sopher reasoned on the fact, and the result of his reasoning 
led him to discover the Law of Gravity, and that this law 
governs, not alone Mundane matter, but that of other 
worlds. “General reasonings,” states Hume, “seem intri- 
cate merely because they are general ; nor is it easy for the 
bulk of mankind to distinguish, in a great number of parti- 
culars, that common circumstance in which they all agree, 
or to extract it pure and unmixed from other superfluous 
circumstances. Every judgment or conclusion with them 
is particular. They cannot enlarge their view to those 
universal propositions which comprehend under them an 
infinite number of individuals, and include a whole science 
in a single theorem. Their eye is confounded with such an 
extensive prospedt ; and the conclusions derived from it, 
even though clearly expressed, seem intricate and obscure.” 
The kind of education that prevails in most of our schools 
and colleges consists in crowding into the minds of the 
learners, unconnected — and therefore unprolific — facts and 
particulars. Education, too, generally begins and ends here 
in this land of educational endowments ; for anyone can 
