EVOLUTION AS SPACE-CONQUEST
Evolution is a struggle for, and a conquest of, space; for evolution, as the word implies, is a drawing out of what is inherent from latency into objective reality, or in other words into spatial—and temporal—extension.
This struggle for space, by means of which the birth and growth of organisms is achieved, is the very texture of life, the plot of every drama. Cells subdivide; micro-organisms war on one another; plants contend for soil, light, moisture; flowers cunningly suborn the bee to bring about their nuptials; animals wage deadly warfare in their rivalry to bring more hungry animals into a space-hungry world. Man is not exempt from this law of the jungle. Nations intrigue and fight for land—of which wealth is only the symbol—and a nation's puissance is measured by its power to push forward into the territory of its neighbor. The self-same impulse drives the individual. One measure of the difference between men in the matter of efficiency is the amount of space each can command: one has a house and grounds in some locality where every square inch has an appreciable value; another some fractional part of a lodging house in the slums. When this bloodless, but none the less deadly, contest for space becomes acute, as in the congested quarters of great cities, man's ingenuity is taxed to devise effective ways of augmenting his space-potency, and he expands in a vertical direction. This third-dimensional extension, typified in the tunnel and in the skyscraper, is but the latest phase of a conquest of space which began with the line of the pioneer's trail through an untracked wilderness.
DIMENSIONAL SEQUENCES
Not only does nature everywhere geometrize, but she does so in a particular way, in which we discover dimensional sequences. Consider the transformation of solid, liquid, gas, from one to another, under the