Note 156 — Chapter XX

Kant was, I believe, the first to call attention to this last order of facts. After pointing out that two opposite spherical triangles, two gloves of a pair, two spirals wound in contrary directions, have identical inward determinations, that is, have their parts defined with relation to each other by the same law, and so must be conceived as identical, he showed that the impossibility of their mutual superposition obliges us to assign to each figure of a symmetrical pair a peculiar difference of its own which can only consist in an outward determination or relation of its parts, no longer to each other, but to the whole of an objectively outlying space with its points of the compass given absolutely. This inconceivable difference is perceived only "through the relation to right and left, which is a matter of immediate intuition." In these last words (welches unmittelbar auf Anschauung geht—Prolegomena, § 12) Kant expresses all that we have meant by speaking of up and down, right and left, as sensations. He is wrong, however, in invoking relation to extrinsic total space as essential to the existence of these contrasts in figures. Relation to our own body is enough.