"A virtuous person will seek the good; he recognises goodness by his own standard?"
"Yes."
"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.