The principle we have made use of not only maintains that we may
equally well choose the carriage or the embankment as our
reference-body for the description of any event (for this, too, is
self-evident). Our principle rather asserts what follows : If we
formulate the general laws of nature as they are obtained from
experience, by making use of
(a) the embankment as reference-body,
(b) the railway carriage as reference-body,
then these general laws of nature (e.g. the laws of mechanics or the
law of the propagation of light in vacuo) have exactly the same form
in both cases. This can also be expressed as follows : For the
physical description of natural processes, neither of the reference
bodies K, K1 is unique (lit. " specially marked out ") as compared
with the other. Unlike the first, this latter statement need not of
necessity hold a priori; it is not contained in the conceptions of "
motion" and " reference-body " and derivable from them; only
experience can decide as to its correctness or incorrectness.
Up to the present, however, we have by no means maintained the
equivalence of all bodies of reference K in connection with the
formulation of natural laws.
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