‘I made the discovery that I had grown up a natural Kantian, beginning with the antinomies of time and space and going on to the unconceptualizability of things as they are in themselves independently of our experience’ (p. 178). Bryan Magee's impressive—and fascinating—case for this claim is made in his autobiographical article in this volume. I heard him hint at some of this many years ago in an interview on the BBC's ‘Man of Action’ programme; the memory of which, together with a more recent encounter with Colin Radford's The Examined Life (‘Philosophy is not confined … to the professional activities of philosophers but pervades human life.’ (p. 1)), led to the implicit question in the title of this series of lectures given at the Royal Institute of Philosophy in 1991–2.

Is there a natural impulse to philosophise? Having a basis in our normal constitution? ‘A wisdom given by nature; not educated by study’? Not artificially made or constructed? John White offers some serious doubts about supposed examples in the case of children. Tennyson is said to have spent hours as a small child sitting by the wainscot intoning ‘Evermore … Evermore …’. Was this natural poetry, and was he already a poet? Or might this better be compared to the murmurings of innumerable bees? ‘The cuckoos, two, would sing in rhyme, as once they did…’;‘… or seemed to do’, Hardy goes on.