From The Vocation Lectures: Science as a Vocation (Max Weber, 1917)
But morally, it is a very different thing if one shirks his straightforward duty to preserve his intellectual integrity. This is what happens when he lacks the courage to make up his mind about his ultimate standpoint but instead resorts to feeble equivocation in order to make his duty less onerous. And that embracing of religion also ranks higher to my mind than the professorial prophecy that forgets that the only morality that exists in a lecture room is that of plain intellectual integrity. This integrity enjoins us to be mindful that for all those multitudes today who are waiting for new prophets and saviors, the situation is the same as we can hear from that beautiful song of the Edomite watchman during the exile that was included in the book of Isaiah. “One calleth to me out of Seir, Watchman, what of the night? what of the night? The watchman said, Even if the morning cometh, it is still night: if ye inquire already, ye will come again and inquire once more. ” The people to whom this was said have inquired and waited for much longer than two thousand years, and e are familiar with its deeply distressing fate. From it we should draw the moral that longing and waiting is not enough and that we must act differently. We must go about our work and meet “the challenges of the day” —both in our human relations and our vocation. But that moral is simple and straightforward if each person finds and obeys the daemon that holds the threads of his life.
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