The answer lay in my case outside formal philosophy. As almost everyone does before theory or dogma crowds in, I knew the notion of need intimately. I had even had to think about it, because, early in my working life, it had been a part of my duty as a civil servant, when working as an assistant principal in a section of the Colonial Office that was dedicated to ‘Colonial Welfare and Development’, to apply the notion. But there, as in the colonial territories where various schemes were conceived and proposed to us as falling under these heads, everyone knew in practice what need meant, knew a need from a mere desire, and knew a vital need from a need that was less than that.