t directs his movements.

Here is another who, while not in such a hurry, is not idling by any
means, since he peers closely at the faces of the men, neglecting the
women, and seems to be looking for some one in particular; or,
perhaps, he neglects men and {70} women alike, and looks anxiously at
the ground, as if he had lost something. Some inner motive shuts him
off from most of the stimuli of the street, while making him extra
responsive to certain sorts of stimuli.

Purposive Behavior

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
actin