Whitehead and Hume

Whitehead presents a multi-faceted critique of Hume's privileging of the sensory 'Impression', an immediate, simple, discrete, immobile datum of experience, that somehow escapes the attention of Bergson. First, he shows how an Impression is an hypostasization of an antecedent feeling of a transmission from an external source. Second, since that more primitive reception entails a feeling of the Causality of its transmitter, that awareness of Causality antecedes Hume's pivotal concept of Causality i. e. that Causality is a combination of Impressions. Third, the imaginability, which Hume himself acknowledges, of a color not previously sensed, disproves, for Whitehead, contrary to Hume's dismissal of the example as trivial, the latter's principle that all experience is derived from Impressions, and proves that some components of experience originate in Platonistic 'Eternal Objects'. Finally, these explicit criticisms imply a fourth, of Hume's Moral Sentimentalism, which originates in feelings of like and dislike, and eventuates in the recognition of Sympathy as the highest Good. For Whitehead, valuations originate in Eternal Objects, and Sympathy originates in the primitive feeling of a transmission. Hence, Hume's Moral doctrine is not rooted in an Impression. More generally, Whitehead demonstrates why the stringency of Hume's Impression inevitably leads to the latter's Scepticism.