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The principal defender of this view of primary experience as `` causal efficacy '' is Alfred North Whitehead.

Our most elemental and unavoidable impressions, he says, are those of being involved in a large arena of powers which have a longer past than our own, which are interrelated in a vast movement through the present toward the future.

We feel the quality of these powers initially as in some degree wholesome or threatening.

Later abstractive and rational processes may indicate errors of judgment in these apprehensions of value, but the apprehensions themselves are the primary stuff of experience.

It takes a great deal of abstraction to free oneself from the primitive impression of larger unities of power and influence and to view one's world simply as a collection of sense data arranged in such and such sequence and pattern, devoid of all power to move the feelings and actions except in so far as they present themselves for inspection.

Whitehead is here questioning David Hume's understanding of the nature of experience ; ;

he is questioning, also, every epistemology which stems from Hume's presupposition that experience is merely sense data in abstraction from causal efficacy, and that causal efficacy is something intellectually imputed to the world, not directly perceived.

What Hume calls `` sensation '' is what Whitehead calls `` perception in the mode of presentational immediacy '' which is a sophisticated abstraction from perception in the mode of causal efficacy.

As long as perception is seen as composed only of isolated sense data, most of the quality and interconnectedness of existence loses its objectivity, becomes an invention of consciousness, and the result is a philosophical scepticism.

Whitehead contends that the human way of understanding existence as a unity of interlocking and interdependent processes which constitute each other and which cause each other to be and not to be is possible only because the basic form of such an understanding, for all its vagueness and tendency to mistake the detail, is initially given in the way man feels the world.

In this respect experience is broader and full of a richer variety of potential meanings than the mind of man or any of his arts or culture are capable of making clear and distinct.