It is, I think, an indisputable fact that Americans are, as Americans, the most self-conscious people in the world, and the most addicted to the belief that the other nations of the earth are in a conspiracy to under value them.
In poetic language, in which the sign as such takes on an autonomous value, this sound symbolism becomes an actual factor and creates a sort of accompaniment to the signified.
The search for the symbolic value of phonemes, each taken as a whole, runs the risk of giving rise to ambiguous and trivial interpretations because phonemes are complex entities, bundles of different distinctive features.
The American public got to see for themselves every day, all day, how this trial progressed. There's a lot of value in the public being able to see how the system works.
And the American public was able to make up their own mind whether this verdict was a just verdict or not. So I think there's a lot of value in the public being able to see how the system works or doesn't work, so I think there's a definite value there.
Another way of judging the value of a prophet's religious experience, therefore, would be to examine the type of manhood that he has created, and the cultural world that has sprung out of the spirit of his message.
