"Gird thee to combat..."

“With keen judgment nicely weigh; And if to thee it then appeareth true, Render thy hands, or, if ‘tis false at last, Gird thee to combat.” – Lucretius

This quotation is from Book II, which continues the discussion of atoms begun in Book I1, and concludes with the startling conclusion that there must be “many worlds.”

But the quotation itself is, to me, a rousing battle cry for the truth. “if ‘tis false, _gird thee to combat.”

Let it inspire us to march heroically into battle for the truth.

Footnotes:
1. "Death does not destroy things so completely that it annihilates the constituent elements: it merely dissolves their union. Then it joins them in fresh combinations, and so causes all things to alter their forms."
2. "Under no circumstances must it be considered likely that this one earth and heaven alone has been formed and that those particles of matter outside it achieve nothing... You must acknowledge the existence elsewhere of other aggregations of matter similar to this world of ours..."