 In the essays “Concerning the Ultimate Ground of the Differentiation of Directions in Space” and “On the Form and Principles of the Sensible and the Intelligible World [Inaugural Dissertation]” of 1768 and 1770, respectively, Kant’s thoughts about mathematics and its results begin to evolve in the direction of his critical philosophy as he begins to recognize the role that a distinct faculty of sensibility will play in an account of mathematical cognition (Carson 2004; Carson 2017; Posy 2020). In these essays, he attributes the success of mathematical reasoning to its access to the “principles of sensitive form” and the “primary data of intuition”, which results in “laws of intuitive cognition” and “intuitive judgments” about magnitude and extension. One such judgment serves to establish the possibility of an object that is “exactly equal and similar to another, but which cannot be enclosed in the same limits as that other, its incongruent counterpart” (2:382) (Buroker 1981; Van Cleve and Frederick 1991; Van Cleve 1999). Kant invokes such “incongruent counterparts” in “Directions in space” to establish the orientability and actuality of a Newtonian-style absolute space, the object of geometry as he then understands it. He invokes the same example in the “Inaugural Dissertation” to establish that spatial relations “can only be apprehended by a certain pure intuition” and so show that “geometry employs principles which are not only indubitable and discursive, but which also fall under the gaze of the mind.” As such, mathematical evidence is “the paradigm and the means of all evidence in the other sciences” (2:403). (Later, in the critical period’s Prolegomena, he will invoke incongruent counterparts to establish the transcendental ideality of space, thereby disavowing his earlier argument in support of absolute space.)