John Locke's account of experience as composed of atomistic simple ideas—disconnectable, discrete units combined and separated by psychological association—mirrors the mechanistic atomism of the material world and shares the same philosophical problems: both reduce to atoms with no internal relationships and only incidental spatial relations.

The word 'perceive' in common usage carries connotations of cognitive apprehension, so Whitehead introduces the term 'prehension' to designate the non-cognitive form of apprehension that may or may not be cognitive.

Value is the intrinsic reality of an event, the outcome of the limitation of eternal possibilities to what is actually actualized; aesthetic attainment occurs through this limiting of boundless possibilities to concrete actuality.

An event has a lifecycle: it begins with initial objective data that give rise to a new event, develops through to a final satisfaction (culmination), which then becomes the thesis for the next antithesis of further objective data precipitating another event, mirroring but with altered vocabulary Hegel's thesis-antithesis-synthesis dialectic.