The era in which we live presents some remarkable characteristics, which have been brought into it by this immense material success.  It is preeminently an age of reality: an age in which a host of unrealities—­queer and strange old notions—­have been destroyed forever.  Never were the vaulted spaces in this grand old temple of a world swept so clean of cobwebs before.  The mind has not gone forth working outside wonders, without effecting equal inside changes.  In achieving abroad, it has been ennobling at home.  At no time was it so free from superstition as now, and from the absurdities which have for centuries beset and filled it.  What numberless delusions, what ghosts, what mysteries, what fables, what curious ideas, have disappeared before the besom of the day!  The old author long ago foretasted this, who wrote,—­“The divine arts of printing and gunpowder have frightened away Robin Goodfellow, and all the fairies.”  It is told of Kepler, that he believed the planets were borne through the skies in the arms of angels; but science shortly took a wider sweep, killed off the angels, and showed that the wandering luminaries had been accustomed from infancy to take care of themselves.  And so has the firmament of all knowledge been cleared of its vapors and fictions, and been revealed in its solid and shining facts.

Here, then, lies the great distinction of the time:  the accumulation of Truth, and the growing appetite for the true and the real.  The year whirls round like the toothed cylinder in a threshing-machine, blowing out the chaff in clouds, but quietly dropping the rich kernels within our reach.  And it will always be so.  Men will sow their notions and reap harvests, but the inexorable age will winnow out the truth, and scatter to the winds whatsoever is error.

Now we see how that impalpable something has been produced which we call the “Spirit of the Age,”—­that peculiar atmosphere in which we live, which fills the lungs of the human spirit, and gives vitality and character to all that men at present think and say and feel and do.  It is this identical spirit of courageous inquiry, honest reality, and intense activity, wrought up into a kind of universal inspiration, moving with the same disposition, the same taste, the same thought, persons whole regions apart and unknown to each other.  We are frequently surprised by coincidences which prove this novel, yet common afflatus.  Two astronomers, with the ocean between them, calculate at the same moment, in the same direction, and simultaneously light upon the same new orb.  Two inventors, falling in with the same necessity, think of the same contrivance, and meet for the first time in a newspaper war, or a duel of pamphlets, for the credit of its authorship.  A dozen widely scattered philosophers as quickly hit upon the self-same idea as if they were in council together.  A more rational development of some old doctrine in divinity springs up in a hundred places