The seed (σπέρμα) is, for Marcus, not only the grain cast into the earth or the seed in the womb: everything that exists is in a manner the seed of what will come from it (σπέρμα… πᾶν τὸ ὃν τοῦ ἐξ αὐτοῦ ἐσομένου). This is a radical widening of the ordinary notion: to count only the literally sown as seed is "very vulgar" (λίαν ἰδιωτικόν). In truth the whole cosmos works seminally: every state carries the next within it, and TERMchange is not perishing but generation. What dies does not vanish — it becomes the matter and the beginning of something new.

The image adjoins the Stoic doctrine of the seminal reason (TERMλόγος σπερματικός): the cosmic reason holds the generative principles of all things, and at the world's renewal everything returns into these seminal λόγοι to be born again. "Everything is a seed" dissolves the fear of death on the side of generation: my dissolution is my becoming-seed.

Med. 4.36 — the image in pure form. The cognate series of "return into the generative principle and rebirth":

• 04-14 — the return into the seminal reason (λόγος σπερματικός) of the Whole;
• 04-21 — souls taken up into the seminal reason of the Whole (bodies transmuted to make room);
• Med. 6.24 — Alexander and his groom received into the same seminal principles;
• Med. 7.23 — nature moulds from one matter a horse, then a tree, then a man;
• Med. 9.35 — loss is nothing but change, and Nature delights in it.
• Med. 09-01 — providence "conceived the seminal reasons (λόγοι) of what was to be," marking off the generative powers: the seminal reason as the source of becoming;
• Med. 09-10 — fruit-bearing as a universal law: man, god, and cosmos all "bear fruit in their season"; confining "fruit" to the vine is "nothing to the point."

In 04-36 the image serves the contemplation of nature and the discipline of desire: seeing every thing as a seed, the practitioner is reconciled to change and death (death = becoming the seed of the new, nothing is lost — cf. TERMmetabole, DOGMAamor-fati). Logically it is the generative counterpart to the images of "return into the Whole" (04-14, 04-21): those stress the return into the elements and the reason of the world, this the answering productivity (every end is a beginning). A secondary move is the correction of a narrow judgement: "seed" is not only the literal kind, and whoever thinks otherwise is ἰδιωτικός (untaught).