Natural Philosophy

At first, the world arrives in a child’s mind as chaos: one experience after another. Then repetition turns the familiar into a clue about what comes next.

Writing at the turn of the twentieth century, Wilhelm Ostwald asks how the separate sciences might add up to a way of understanding the natural world. He begins with the mind’s simplest work: remembering what repeats, forming concepts, and using them to anticipate the future. For Ostwald, science is not merely a storehouse of facts about the past; its purpose is to help us meet what is coming. Even the choice to save food before winter rests on this power of prediction. And if science must serve human purposes, what becomes of the ideal of pursuing it “for its own sake”?

With centuries of literature, it's inevitable that some will fall through the cracks. We hunt down public domain works and restore them so they're not lost to the world.

Who are we? We're Cairn Press. Our background is in design, publishing, typography, and technology. These skills fuel our mission to create the highest quality Public Domain eBooks available online, at an affordable price. We give them the treatment they deserve; our proprietary process restores books for a better overall user experience in design, readability, and e-reader compatibility.