Genre and place in the book. A programmatic exercise of physics (φυσιολογία): "contemplate without ceasing." After the aphorisms on transience (04-33–04-35), a positive turn: transience is only change, and change is what Nature loves most of all.

Change as Nature's love. TERMμεταβολή is not loss and decay but the very way in which "the nature of the Whole (TERMἡ τῶν ὅλων φύσις) makes new things like the old." This removes the fear of change: there is nothing to fear, for nothing comes to be without change (cf. Med. 7.18 — "what is more pleasing to nature than change?"; 9.35 — "loss is but change, and the Whole delights in it").

The seed (σπέρμα). A radical turn: everything that exists is the seed of what will come from it. Not only the grain cast into earth or womb (the narrow, "vulgar" — λίαν ἰδιωτικόν — notion), but every thing carries the next within it. Death, then, is no end but a becoming-seed of something new (cf. 04-14 — the return into the seminal reason, λόγος σπερματικός; Med. 6.24 — the seminal principles; 7.23 — one matter moulded in turn into horse, tree, man).

φαντάζῃ — the narrowness of imagining. "You picture only those as seeds…" — the verb here is not about the technical φαντασία (the impression with which assent works), but about the everyday "you picture to yourself": the limitation of the layman's view, which is called ἰδιωτικόν. Hence I do not tag the term phantasia — it is a different sense of the word.

The disciplines. The principal one is desire: the contemplation of change reconciles us to the cosmic process, dissolving the fear of change and death. The secondary is assent: the correction of the narrow, "vulgar" judgement about what a seed is.

The exercise. EXERCISEContemplation of nature: the markers διηνεκῶς ("continuously") and ἐθίζου ("accustom yourself") set up precisely a habit of seeing all things in the flux of becoming — not a single act but a permanent optics.

Parallels. Nature loves change — Med. 7.18; 9.35 (cf. TERMmetabole). Everything is the seed of the next, the seminal reason — 04-14; Med. 6.24; 7.23 (cf. TERMphysis). The continuous contemplation of change — 04-05; 04-21 (cf. EXERCISEcontemplation-of-nature).