ABSTRACT
The pathos with which Weber defended his demand that scientific life be founded necessarily and on principle on the renunciation of all speculation reveals him to have been motivated even by some need for metaphysical salvation. Viewed against the fundamentally unambiguous background of Weber's position on science, the effects which he had on the history of scholarship appear as equivocal as Janus. It was metaphysical historicism which prevented Weber also from recognizing the ahistorical, eruptive and Protestant quality of his own scientific modus operandi, or from drawing the critical conclusions which such a perception would ultimately have demanded. The sociological disposition should thus be seen as one which is characteristic of the turn of an era; it focuses attention simultaneously on the future and the past. For in reducing every interpretation of meaning to the intended rather than the absolute meaning, Weber was relinquishing the systematic unidimensionality of the scientific world-picture.
