 One must be quite circumspect in drawing inferences from this terminological shift on Spinoza's part. For one thing, the word for which conari is substituted, tendere, can have similar connotations itself, carrying the sense of a try or an attempt. For another, “conari” is, as Curley points out (Spinoza 1985, p. 280 n. 43), a perfectly good Cartesian word, and in Descartes' usage, it is quite clear that “conari” is not intended to imply anything really active on the part of the “striving” body. In Principles 3.56, Descartes tells us that the striving (conari) after some motion of inanimate things “merely means that they are positioned and pushed into motion in such a way that they will in fact travel in that direction, unless they are prevented by some other cause”. Spinoza faithfully reiterates this passive sense of “striving” on Descartes' behalf in PCP IIId3. On the other hand, “conari” is also cognate with a perfectly good Spinozistic word, “conatus”, which is his term in the Ethics for an individual's inherent power of striving to persevere in its being (IIp6). Spinoza identifies this power as the essence of the individual (IIIp7), and further identifies its increase with the individual's increased power of action, as opposed to passion, that is, with an increase in power of self-determination as opposed to external determination (IIIp11). This suggests that “conari”, as Spinoza intends it, involves something more than the mere passive tendency the term signifies for Descartes. Recalling once again that the inertial tendency of bodies described in PCP IIp14 cannot, for Spinoza, be accounted for by appeal, in the manner of Descartes, to divine will, the substitution of “conari” for “tendere” in PCP IIp17 may signal the fact that Spinoza is all along thinking of inertia as resulting from an active principle in bodies as such.