"Two weeks after Stoner received his Bachelor of Arts Degree, Archduke Francis Ferdinand was assassinated at Sarajevo by a Serbian nationalist; and before autumn war was all over Europe. ..............
But for Stoner the future lay bright and certain and unchanging. He saw it, not as a flux of event and change and potentiality, but as a territory ahead that waited his exploration. He saw it as the great University library, to which new wings might be built, to which new books might be added and from which old ones might be withdrawn while its true nature remained essentially unchanged. He saw the future in the institution to which he had committed himself and which so imperfectly understood; he conceived himself changing in that future, but he saw the future itself as the instrument of change rather than its object."
But for Stoner the future lay bright and certain and unchanging. He saw it, not as a flux of event and change and potentiality, but as a territory ahead that waited his exploration. He saw it as the great University library, to which new wings might be built, to which new books might be added and from which old ones might be withdrawn while its true nature remained essentially unchanged. He saw the future in the institution to which he had committed himself and which so imperfectly understood; he conceived himself changing in that future, but he saw the future itself as the instrument of change rather than its object."
