noun
definition
The power or act which directs or impels to effort of any kind, whether muscular or psychical.
Examples of conation in a Sentence
Cognition is therefore distinct from emotion and conation; it has no psychological connexion with feelings of pleasure and pain, nor does it tend as such to issue in action.
Under the second head, according to Ward, as according to Wundt, knowledge is experience; we must start with the duality of subject and object, or perpetual reality, phenomenon, in the unity of experience, and not believe, as realists do, that either subject or object is distinct from this unity; moreover, experience requires " conation," because it is to interesting objects that the subject attends; conation is required for all synthesis, associative and intellective; thinking is doing; presentation, feeling, conation are one inseparable whole; and the unity of the subject is due to activity and not to a substratum.
He thinks that it is the origin of the categories of causality, which he refers to " conation," and substance, which he attributes to the interaction of active subjects with their environment and to their intercourse with each other.