 The endorsement of Hamilton’s view might seem perverse—and, in fact, Jones is elsewhere critical of his view (1906, 35–6)—but it is necessary if Jones is to retain the view that significant assertion is, at root, the assertion of an identity. After all, if ‘All humans are mortal’ asserts an identity, then, given that identity is commutative, it entails the apparently nonsensical ‘Mortals are all humans.’ The result is at least intelligible if we suppose that the predicate is also quantified—if, that is, ‘All humans are mortal’ is just ‘All humans are some mortals.’ For then, the consequence would be ‘Some mortals are all humans,’ which is just the claim that some subset of the set of mortals is identical to the set of (all) humans. (This, of course, is not quite an identity statement, since one of the terms is quantified, but it is the closest we can get to a workable version of Jones’s proposal.)