Now it would be a great mistake to rule these purposeful individuals out of our psychology. We wish to understand busy people as well as idlers. What makes a man busy is some inner purpose or motive. He still responds to present stimuli--otherwise he would be in a dream or trance and out of all touch with what was going on about him--but his actions are in part controlled by an inner motive.
To complete the foundations of our psychology, then, we need to fit purpose into the general plan of stimulus and response. At first thought, purpose seems a misfit here, since--
First, a purpose is an inner force, whereas what arouses a response should be a stimulus, and typically an external stimulus. We do not wish to drop back into the old "self-activity" psychology, which thought of the individual as originating his acts from within himself. But if we could show that a purpose is itself an inner response to some external stimulus, and acts in its turn as a "central stimulus" to further reactions, this difficulty would disappear.
Second, while a typical reaction, like the reflex or the simple reaction of the experiment, is prompt and over with at once, a purpose persists. It keeps the busy man, in our illustration, hurrying all the way down the street and around the corner and how much farther we cannot say. It is very different from a momentary response, or from a stimulus that arouses a momentary response and nothing more.
Third, what persists, in purposive behavior, is the tendency [{71}] towards some end or goal. The purposeful person wants something he has not yet got, and is striving towards some future result. Whereas a stimulus pushes him from behind, a goal beckons to him from ahead. This element of action directed towards some end is absent from the simple response to a stimulus.
In short, we have to find room in our stimulus-response psychology for action persistently steered in a certain direction by some cause acting from within the individual. We must find room for internal states that last for a time and direct action. In addition, we sometimes, though not always, need to find room for conscious foreknowledge of the goal towards which the action is directed.
Fig. 21.--The stimulus-response scheme complicated to allow for the existence of T, an inner motive or tendency, which, aroused by an external stimulus, itself arouses a motor response. If the reaction-tendency were linked so firmly to a single response as to arouse that response with infallible certainty and promptness, then it would be superfluous for psychology to speak of a tendency at all. But often quite a series of responses, R1, R2, etc., follows upon a single stimulus, all tending towards the same end-result, such as escape; and then the notion of a "tendency" is by no means superfluous.
"Purpose" is not the best general term to cover all the internal factors that direct activity, since this word rather implies foresight of the goal, which demands the intellectual ability to imagine a result not present to the senses. This highest level of inner control over one's behavior had best be left for consideration in later chapters on imagination and will. There are two levels below this. In the middle level, the individual has an inner steer towards a certain result, though without conscious foresight of that result. At the lowest level, we can scarcely speak of the individual as being directed towards any precise goal, but still his [{72}] internal state is such as to predispose him for certain reactions and against other reactions.