A passage in the NY Times about the latest study on the Antikythera mechanism brings us back to Tarnas' discussion of the attempt to bring Romantic and scientific thought together. Tarnas notes that Goethe felt that, "the human spirit does not simply impose its order on nature, as Kant thought. Rather, nature's spirit brings forth its own order through man, who is the organ of nature's self revelation."

That view is certainly in line with the proposal that man's and nature's aspirations (whether explicitly identified or not) are shared.

What's more it helps explain the point that Dr. François Charette of the University of Munich museum in Germany made with regard to the Antikythera mechanism. Noting that the mechanism, made around 150-100 B.C., employed gears that weren't seen again for 1,000 years, Charette noted that "The gear-wheel, in this case, had to be reinvented."

Note that he said reinvented, not rediscovered. Without making this a semantic argument and instead focusing on the face value of what he said, how does man come to the same brilliant, world changing invention more than once?

Could it be evolution of wheels and gears, such that there were millions that again fell by the wayside in the 1,000 years after Antikythera? Or could it be that a geared wheel is some perfect ideal naturally affixed in our minds?