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Conatus is a term used in early philosophies of
psychology and
metaphysics to refer to an innate inclination of a thing to continue to exist and enhance itself. This "thing" may be
mind,
matter or a combination of both. Over the millennia, many different definitions and treatments have been formulated by philosophers. The most important of these include the seventeenth century philosophers
René Descartes,
Baruch Spinoza, and
Gottfried Leibniz, along with their
Empiricist contemporary
Thomas Hobbes. The
conatus may refer to the instinctual "will to live" of animals or to various metaphysical theories of
motion and
inertia. Often the concept is associated with
God's will in a
pantheist view of
Nature. The concept may be broken up into separate definitions for the mind and body, or even split up when discussing
centrifugal force or inertia. After its formulation in ancient
Greece, successive philosophers to adopt the term put their own personal twist on the concept, each developing the term differently such that it now has no concrete and universally accepted definition. Today,
conatus is rarely used in the technical sense, since modern physics and evolutionary biology use concepts such as
inertia and
conservation of momentum that have superseded it.