Perhaps not the usage but the idea has a long pedigree. Durkheim e.g. seemed to think our categories were so to speak projections into the mind of the spatial arrangements of surrounding society:
"The first logical categories were social categories ... the things that [genera] comprise are generally imagined as situated in a sort of ideational milieu, with a more or less clearly delimited spatial circumscription. It is certainly not without cause that concepts and their interrelations have so often been represented by concentric and eccentric circles, interior and exterior to each other, etc. Might it not be that this tendency to imagine purely logical groupings in a form contrasting so much with their true nature originated in the fact that at first they were conceived in the form of social groups occupying, consequently, definite social positions in space?" --Durkheim and Mauss, *Primitive Classification* (1903).
But that's probably nonsense. --CGE
--- Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
> ... 1) When did the use of "space" illustrated in the quote below
> become common? Is it a techie word originally? ...