Crossword-Solution: LACUNA 6 letters, 35 clues 🏆 scrabble score: 8

Very many defects have been corrected by the various editions of the Hymns, but a considerable number still defy all efforts; and especially an abnormal number of undoubted lacuna disfigure the text.

But how can I? How dare I? The thing is so bizarre, so inexplicable, so incomprehensible, so silly! If I were not perfectly sure of what I have seen, sure that there was not in my reasoning any defect, any error in my declarations, any lacuna in the inflexible sequence of my observations, I should believe myself to be the dupe of a simple hallucination, the sport of a singular vision.

Where he has made no such suggestion, or none that seemed to the editors to be adequate, the lacuna has been indicated by asterisks, though here too a few words have been added in the translation, sufficient to connect the sense.

Non evitavit validos Dunkerka lacertos, Non intercludens alta Lacuna vias, Et scribenda gerens vivaci marmore digna, Scribere Caesareo more vel ipse potest.

But this would have been an “argument too subtle” for Socrates, who rejects the theological account of the origin of language “as an excuse for not giving a reason,” which he compares to the introduction of the “Deus ex machina” by the tragic poets when they have to solve a difficulty; thus anticipating many modern controversies in which the primary agency of the divine Being is confused with the secondary cause; and God is assumed to have worked a miracle in order to fill up a lacuna in human knowledge.