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Theaetetus - Plato

He [Protagoras ] was a very wise man, and we should try to understand him.

In order to illustrate his meaning let me suppose that there is the same wind blowing in our faces, and one of us may be hot and the other cold.

How is this?

Protagoras will reply that the wind is hot to him who is cold, cold to him who is hot. And "is" means "appears," and when you say "appears to him," that means "he feels." Thus feeling, appearance, perception, coincide with being. I suspect, however, that this was only a "facon de parler," by which he imposed on the common herd like you and me; he told "the truth" (in allusion to the title of his book, which was called "The Truth") in secret to his disciples.

For he was really a votary of that famous philosophy in which all things are said to be relative; nothing is great or small, or heavy or light, or one, but all is in motion and mixture and transition and flux and generation, not "being," as we ignorantly affirm, but "becoming." This has been the doctrine, not of Protagoras only, but of all philosophers, with the single exception of Parmenides.

Empedocles, Heracleitus, and others, and all the poets, with Epicharmus, the king of Comedy, and Homer, the king of Tragedy, at their head, have said the same; the latter has these words--

"Ocean, whence the gods sprang, and mother Tethys."

And many arguments are used to show, that motion is the source of life, and rest of death: ….. and living creatures owe their origin to a similar cause; and if the ‘Sun’ ceased to move, chaos would come again."