Conatus
philosophical term originating from Latin, meaning "effort" or "striving." It refers to the innate inclination of a thing to continue to exist and enhance itself. The concept is prominent in the works of several philosophers, most notably in the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza, but it also appears in the writings of Thomas Hobbes and René Descartes.
Origin
The Latin term traces to Stoic philosophy, but its modern philosophical force came from Thomas Hobbes, who defined it in De Corpore (1655) as the infinitesimal unit at the origin of motion. Baruch Spinoza then made it the cornerstone of his metaphysics in Ethics (1677), proposing that every existing thing endeavors to persist in its own being — a principle he extended from physics into psychology and moral philosophy.