  Spinoza’s naturalism benefits rhetorically from his use of the term ‘conatus’ to describe the essences of human beings and other finite modes alike. For the term is not only a technical term of Cartesian physics. Cicero uses the term in De Natura Deorum (and other Roman and Greek Stoics use close cognates) in a psychological sense, referring to human desire, and Hobbes in his physiology uses the term to refer to the physical causes of human desire (Leviathan VI). So ‘conatus’ has both broad, physical and specifically human, psychological connotations which help to make the gap between nature and the human mind appear narrow.