In the long interval between 1747 and 1768 Kant continued to hold to some such compromise, retaining Leibniz’s view that space is derivative and relative, and rejecting Newton’s view that it is prior to, and pre-conditions, all the bodies that exist in it. But in that latter year he published a pamphlet[626] in which, following in the steps of the mathematician, Euler,[627] he drew attention to certain facts which would seem quite conclusively to favour the Newtonian as against the Leibnizian interpretation of space. The three dimensions of space are primarily distinguishable by us only through the relation in which they stand to our body. By relation to the plane that is at right angles to our body we distinguish ‘above’ and ‘below’; and similarly through the other two planes we determine what is ‘right’ and ‘left,’ ‘in front’ and ‘behind.’ Through these distinctions we are enabled to define differences which cannot be expressed in any other manner. All species of hops--so Kant maintains--wind themselves around their supports from left to right, whereas all species of beans take the opposite direction. All snail shells, with some three exceptions, turn, in descending from their apex downwards, from left to right. This determinate direction of movement, natural to each species, like the difference in spatial configuration between a right and a left hand, or between a right hand and its reflection in a mirror, involves in all cases a reference of the given object to the wider space within which it falls, and ultimately to space as a whole. Only so can its determinate character be distinguished from its opposite counterpart. For as Kant points out, though the right and the left hand are _counterparts_, that is to say, objects which have a common definition so long as the arrangement of the parts of each is determined in respect to its central line of reference, they are none the less inwardly _incongruent_, since the one can never be made to occupy the space of the other. As he adds in the _Prolegomena_, the glove of one hand cannot be used for the other hand. This inner incongruence compels us to distinguish them as different, and this difference is only determinable by location of each in a single absolute space that constrains everything within it to conform to the conditions which it prescribes. In three-dimensional space everything must have a right and a left side, and must therefore exhibit such inner differences as those just noted. Spatial determinations are not, as Leibniz teaches, subsequent to, and dependent upon, the relations of bodies to one another; it is the former that determine the latter. “The reason why that which in the shape of a body exclusively concerns its relation to pure space can be apprehended by us only through its relation to other bodies, is that absolute space is not an object of any outer sensation, but a fundamental conception which makes all such differences possible.”[628]