[Sidenote: _The historical element in definitions, taken in their concreteness._] We must not, however, be in a hurry, but rather carefully recall the observation just made incidentally: that the verbal or literary form can throw into _relief_ a moment of the judgment, while casting a shadow over the other and causing it to be forgotten, without thereby ever being able to suppress it. There seemed, we remember, to be no trace of concepts in perceptive judgments or judgments of fact, and especially in those forms of them which are called merely existential and in those called impersonal. Yet there can be no doubt that none of those judgments is ever possible without the concept as basis. An analysis which does not allow itself to be arrested by appearances and examines verbal forms as regards both what they express and what they leave to be understood (though this too is expressed in its own way) has discovered it. Similarly a definition does not exist in the air, as might appear from the examples given in treatises, in which the _where_ and the _when_ and the _individual_ and the _actual circumstances_ in which the definition has been given are omitted. In a definition thus presented, it would certainly be impossible to discover a representative element and an individual judgment. But the reason for this is that it has been mutilated and made abstract and indeterminate, to such an extent that it can be made determinate only by the meaning which he to whom it is communicated likes to attach to it. If, on the contrary, we look at the definition in its concrete reality, we shall _always_ find in it when we examine it with care the _representative element_ and the _individual judgment._ [Sidenote: _The definition as answer to a question and solution of a problem._] For every definition is the answer to a question, the solution of a problem. Did we not ask questions and set problems, there would be no occasion for giving any definition. Why should we give them? What need could there be? The definition is an act of the spirit and every act of the spirit is conditioned. Without contradiction, there can be no agreement; without the shock of multiplicity there can be no unity; without the travail of doubt that calls for peace, there can be no affirmation of the true. Not only does the answer presuppose the question; but every answer implies a certain question. The answer must be in harmony with the question; otherwise, it would not be an answer, but the avoiding of an answer. In reply to a question of a certain kind, we should turn our deaf ear, as the saying is, or reply with a blow. This means that the nature of the question colours the answer and that a definition taken in its concreteness is determined by the problem which gives it rise. The definition varies with the problem. [Sidenote: _Individual and historical conditionedness of every question and problem._]