The Extensive Continuum as a Symbolic Form

The extensive continuum is necessary to our understanding of the associations, linkages and overlappings among actual entities by means of which we describe the world. The continuum itself does not utilize shapes, dimensions or measurability. Whitehead shows that these properties are contingent on the structuring of events. For instance, the cognizance of spatiality is available only to high-grade organisms. Human concepts of space depend on an underpinning of already harmonized notions developed from the human experience of events, as when a baby learns not to reach for the moon- an experience that subsumes what the body-mind has learned so that it can later be reconstituted in the mode of non-sensuous perception and become referent to a variety of occasions.