  In the 1930s volumes of The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce began to appear, with Charles Hartshorne, Paul Weiss, and Arthur Burks as their editors. For almost three decades these volumes, and various collections of entries culled from them were the only generally available source for Peirce’s thoughts. Unfortunately, many of the entries in the Collected Papers are not integral pieces of Peirce’s own design, but rather stretches of writing that were cobbled together by the editors at their own discretion (sometimes one might almost say “whim”) from different Peircean sources. Often a single entry will consist of patches of writing from very different periods of Peirce’s intellectual life, and these patches might even be in tension or outright contradiction with each other. Such entries in the Collected Papers make very difficult reading if one tries to regard them as consistent, sustained passages of argument. They also tend to give the reader a false picture of Peirce as unsystematic, desultory, and unable to complete a train of thought. In general, even though Peirce is often obscure and  even at his best is seldom easy to read, the Collected Papers make Peirce’s thinking look  much more obscure than it really is.