from Geometry and Meaning, Dominic Widdows (cont'd):

“Our final chapter is about a distinctly twentieth century branch of mathematics that weaves our previous threads together, treating the hierarchies of Aristotle and Darwin, the geometry of Hamilton and Grassmann, and the logic of Boole as different variants of one underlying structure called a lattice. In a way, this is fitting example for the historical process of divergence and convergence we have described: the distinctive property of a lattice is that any two elements can be disjoined (allowed to spread out and diversify) and conjoined (woven together). All this talk of twentieth-century mathematics and unifying theories should not put you off: lattices are not particularly complicated, and like many of the newest branches of scholarship, the ideas behind lattice theory go back at least to classical Greece, and beyond this to roots in astrology and mysticism lost beyond antiquity...