The discussion of the problem constituted by the connection between causation and perception has been conducted by the various schools of thought derived from Hume and Kant under the misapprehension generated by an inversion of the true constitution of experience. The inversion was explicit in the writings of Hume and of Kant: for both of them presentational immediacy was the primary fact of perception, and any apprehension of causation was, somehow or other, to be elicited from this primary fact. This view of the relation between causation and perception, as items in experience, was not original to these great philosophers. It is to be found presupposed in Locke and Descartes; and they derived it from mediaeval predecessors. But the modern critical movement in philosophy arose when Hume and Kant emphasized the fundamental, inescapable, importance which this doctrine possesses for any philosophy admitting its truth. The philosophy of organism does not admit its truth, and thus rejects the touchstone which is the neolithic weapon of 'critical' philosophy. It must be remembered that clearness in consciousness is no evidence for primitiveness in the genetic process: the opposite doctrine is more nearly true.
Owing to its long dominance, it has been usual to assume as an obvious fact the primacy of presentational immediacy. We open our eyes and our other sense-organs; we then survey the contemporary world decorated with sights, and sounds, and tastes; and then, by the sole aid of this information about the contemporary world, thus decorated, we draw what conclusions we can as to the actual world. No philosopher really holds that this is the sole source of information: Hume and his followers appeal vaguely to 'memory' and to 'practice,' in order to supplement their direct information; and Kant wrote other Critiques in order to supplement his Critique of Pure Reason. But the general procedure of modern philosophical 'criticism' is to tie down opponents strictly to the front door of presentational immediacy as the sole source of information, while one's own philosophy makes its escape by a back door veiled under the ordinary usages of language.
Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, II.VIII.III
To return to Hume's doctrine (cf. Treatise, Part III, Sect. V) of the origination of 'impressions of sensation' from unknown causes, it is first necessary to distinguish logical priority from physical priority. Undoubtedly an impression of sensation is logically the simplest of physical prehensions. …
There is a logical simplicity about such a sensation which makes it the primitive, aboriginal type of physical feeling. But there are two objections to Hume's doctrine which assigns to them a physical priority. First, there is the empirical objection. Hume's theory of a complex of such impressions elaborated into a supposition of a common physical world is entirely contrary to naIve experience. We find ourselves in the double role of agents and patients in a common world, and the conscious recognition of impressions of sensation is the work of sophisticated elaboration. This is also Locke's doctrine in the third and fourth books of his Essay. The child first dimly elucidates the complex externality of particular things exhibiting a welter of forms of definiteness, and then disentangles his impressions of these forms in isolation. A young man does not initiate his experience by dancing with impressions of sensation, and then proceed to conjecture a partner. His experience takes the converse route. The unempirical character of the philosophical school derived from Hume cannot be too often insisted upon. The true empirical doctrine is that physical feelings are in their origin vectors, and that the genetic process of concrescence introduces the elements which emphasize privacy.
Process and Reality, IV.IV.II.
