"He is the measure of truth, and he chooses a teacher who will show him a fitting wisdom, as he will choose a cobbler who will make him a fitting shoe?" "Socrates, I frankly admit that I am tired of your cobbler." "But is virtue doing things well or ill?" "Well." "And the individual judges whether the thing is well or ill done?" "You are still cobbling, Socrates." "Surely, Protagoras, if truth is drawn entirely out of the individual, he will know virtue better than he will know a shoe. I do not want you to say that I am forcing your words into a construction that they will not bear. Your arguments suggest others to me. I am cobbling, you say, point out the patches! You say that there is no truth external to the individual; that if a man feels hot, it is hot; that justice is what he thinks just, that he cannot know external things. Surely, then, his whole standard of truth is himself. And if he fashion a God out of his inner consciousness, surely God exists more truly than a tree or a shoe exists." "Socrates, my words may bear this expansion. You hold, then, that we may have knowledge of their existence. I am not averse to this belief; but to me a God is simply a self, a self freed from our conditions of life. "Let us not say that Socrates or Protagoras has triumphed. We have simply got a little closer to the truth." "God may exist for the individual, Socrates; in the individual consciousness. But the truth lies beyond us. Man's image of a tree is true, because a tree is." "The colour, the shape, the texture, are not," replied Socrates; "except as the man sees them. Philip was right in saying that if we know one thing we know all others. Philip, wake up!" "Socrates, what mischief are you up to now that Pythodorus is gone," said Philip. "You talk too much. Protagoras said simply that a monkey imagines God as a monkey, while a peacock imagines him as a peacock." "O Philip, what a fool you are! Does a foolish man imagine a foolish God? Does a blind man imagine a blind God?" "Of course not." "Then, listen, Philip! Does Pythodorus imagine a God who is a nuisance to his friends?" "No." "Very well, then, some standard exists which is external to the individual, but which he only knows through his inner consciousness. The oracle at Delphi was right when it said: 'Know thyself. For the more a man knows himself, the more he knows God.'" "It is dawn," said Lysis. "O Socrates, you are the most unbridled and insatiable of all the sophists," said Protagoras, laughing. "You have laid a trap for me." "Why do you accuse me of laying a trap for you? We are not arguing with the sole desire of scoring a point against each other. I do not lay traps for you, as if I were a hunter of men; but I lay traps for truth, being a hunter of truth, and having no other reason for existence but to chase and follow after it wherever it may be hidden."