 The obvious question Spinoza’s account raises is why, in such cases of mental conflict, in which certain ideas “exclude” one another, should one of these ideas prevail? As Diane Steinberg notes, Spinoza cannot have in mind purely logical inconsistency or contradiction between ideas, since this doesn’t yet give us a reason to nonarbitrarily prefer one idea over another (2003). The psychology of “exclusion” must involve not merely such logical incompatibility of contents, but something that would asymmetrically tip the scales in favor of one idea. Commentators have proposed that greater causal power as the best candidate for this role: the winning idea is the idea with more power to continue existing and to produce further ideas (in short, greater power to “strive” [E3p7]), or greater power to determine the mind’s activity or causal power as a whole (e.g. Della Rocca 2003; J. Steinberg 2018b).