A single line with no finite verb. The passage is not a thought but a questionnaire: four items joined by καί, each opening with an interrogative or a conjunction. This is what a working template looks like, not a meditation: something to be run over any object at all, as one runs down the columns of a table.

Four columns. (1) Πόθεν ἐλήλυθεν — "whence has it come": origin. (2) ἐκ τίνων ὑποκειμένων — "out of what underlying things": composition, ὑποκείμενον being the school's term for the material substrate. (3) TERMεἰς τί TERMμεταβάλλει — "into what does it change": destination. (4) οἷον ἔσται μεταβαλόν — "what will it be like, having changed": the state after. The first two columns look backward, the second two forward; the thing turns out to be pinched between two states, neither of which is itself.

The fifth item is not a question but a conclusion. καὶ ὡς οὐδὲν TERMκακὸν πείσεται — "and that it will suffer no evil." Syntactically it is one more member of the list (ὡς in place of an interrogative); in sense it is the upshot: having taken a thing through the four columns, one finds there is nothing to fear, because what befalls it is only TERMchange. Cf. 10.18, where the mode of dissolution is set by each thing's nature, and 10.7, where φθείρεσθαι is redefined "in the sense of ἀλλοιοῦσθαι."

Kinship with, and difference from, EXERCISEdefinition. The first two columns are pure EXERCISEμερισμός (8.11, 3.11): what is it in itself, of what is it compounded. The second two are already EXERCISEφυσιολογία: where will it go. The joining of two devices in a single line is what makes the passage a working formula: not to dismantle (which deflates) nor to admire (which reconciles), but to carry the thing through time and see that there is no harm in it. The governing discipline is assent, the sustaining one desire.