 Yet this result is neither incontrovertible nor an untrammeled consequence of Einstein’s theory of gravitation. There is, first of all, the shadowy status accorded to universal forces. A sympathetic reading (e.g., Dieks 1987) suggests that the notion serves usefully in mediating between a traditional a priori commitment to Euclidean geometry and the view of modern geometrodynamics, where gravitational force is “geometrized away” (see  §5).  After all, as Reichenbach explicitly acknowledged, gravitation is itself a universal force, coupling to all bodies and affecting them in the same manner (1928: 294–6 [1958: 256–8]). Hence the choice recommended by descriptive simplicity is merely a stipulation that infinitesimal metrical appliances be considered as “differentially at rest” in an inertial system (1924: 115 [1969: 147]). This is a stipulation that spacetime measurements always take place in regions that are to be considered small Minkowski spacetimes (arenas of gravitation-free physics). By the same token, consistency then required an admission that “the transition from the special theory to the general one represents merely a renunciation of metrical characteristics” (1924: 115 [1969: 147]), or, even more pointedly, that “all the metrical properties of the spacetime continuum are destroyed by gravitational fields” where only topological properties remain (1928: 308 [1958: 268–9]). To be sure, these bizarre conclusions are supposed to be rendered more palatable in connection with the epistemological reduction of spacetime structures in the causal theory of time.