Sep 6, 2009

Fatherless Child - Expose Number Nineteen

http://www.thelizlibrary.org/fatherless/019.html

This child was born in a small town in Greece. His mother was from an aristocratic family, and his father was a reknowned physician. He was the last of three children. His mother died when he was young, and following his father's death when he was 10, the child became a ward of his older sister's husband. At that age he was sent off to a boarding school.

The child was a good student. At age 17, he went to the country's finest academy of higher learning, where he excelled. His studies at the academy included languages, philosophy, and the maths, but he was most interested in science. After graduating, he first became a researcher and then a professor at the same academy.

When he was somewhat older, he married the teenage daughter of a friend, and they had one child. By all accounts, it was a successful and loving marriage, but his wife took ill while still young and died prematurely. Later he had an illegitimate second daughter with another woman. He was close to both of his children throughout their lives and provided well for them.

During his years of teaching, he began to develop a systematic approach to doing research, which he called "analytics", and which he considered necessary to master before science or any other learning in any subject properly could be advanced.

This child became well known throughout his country as a teacher, and for his ideas on subjects ranging from politics to ethics to biology. Later he founded a new educational institution, whose reputation ultimately surpassed the academy he formerly had attended and worked at.

He wrote in one of his treatises that "Education is the best provision for old age."

He also believed that those who educate children are to be more honored than parents, for parents give a child life, but the other give a child the art of living well.

One of his most famous sayings is, "The whole is greater than the sum of its parts."

This child, whose systems of research and logical reasoning provided the foundation for centuries of subsequent human advancement in the fields of philosophy, ethics, law, mathematics, education, and science was

Aristotle, a boy from a "fatherless home."

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