"mere necessity" is a correct and usable phrase in written English.
You could use it to emphasize that something is absolutely necessary, as in the following example: "After seeing the horrifying conditions, we felt a mere necessity to help those less fortunate."
Food is more than a mere necessity; it nurtures, and binds people to each other and their cultural identity.
No longer a mere necessity for human survival, water has become an object of international financial speculation and experts predict that "blue gold" will soon become the most important physical commodity worldwide, dwarfing oil and precious metals.
Still, Clarke thinks that we should affirm with some of the early church fathers that this derivation of the Son from the Father is "not by mere Necessity of Nature, (which would be in reality Self-existence, not Filiation;) But by an Act of the Father's incomprehensible Power and Will" (141, original emphases).
Similarities to that publication are a mere necessity for ensuring autonomy of this work.
Not just below the level of comfortable living, but real poverty, in the old-fashioned sense of the word — that they are hard put to it to get the mere necessities, beginning with enough to eat.
And, indeed, at this very time, though circumstances made him so important, and in the danger of the tottering government he was recognized as the only or the ablest support of it, yet he well understood that he owed not his high position to any good-will or kindness, but to the mere necessities of the usurper.
It's a lesson clearly learned from Twitter, whose own 140-character limit initially began as a mere technical necessity – to allow for the message, a 23-character username, a colon and a space to fit in one 165-character SMS message – but soon grew into something else entirely.
An omnipotent agent has the power to overrule (or supersede) any law of nature (a mere physical necessity).
Erdmann is also taken to task for his suggestion that logical laws might have mere 'hypothetical necessity', that is, that they are relative to the human species.
It is widely acknowledged that it would be too weak to formulate physicalism as the claim that as a matter of mere nomological necessity, everything globally supervenes on the physical.
Get the bare necessities.
