they are
unwilling--indeed, because they are unwilling to do so--yet we need not
feel grateful to them as though we had received a benefit from them,
because fortune has changed the evil which they intended into good. Do
you suppose that I am indebted to a man who strikes my enemy with a blow
which he aimed at me, who would have injured me had he not missed his
mark? It often happens that by openly perjuring himself a man makes even
trustworthy witnesses disbelieved, and renders his intended victim an
object of compassion, as though he were being ruined by a conspiracy.
Some have been saved by the very power which was exerted to crush
them, and judges who would have condemned a man by law, have refused
to condemn him by favour. Yet they did not confer a benefit upon the
accused, although they rendered him a service, because we must
consider at what the dart was aimed, not what it hits, and a benefit
is distinguished from an injury not by its result, but by the spirit in
which it was meant. By contradicting himself, by irritating the judge by
his arrogance, or by rashly allowing his whole case to depend upon the
testimony of one witness, my opponent may have saved my cause. I do not
consider whether his mistakes benefited me or not, for he wished me ill.

IX. In order that I may be grateful, I must wish to do what my
benefactor must have wished in order that he might bestow a benefit. Can
anything be more unjust than to bear a grudge against a person who may
have trodden upon one's foot in a crowd, or splashed one, or pushed one
the way which one did not wish to go? Yet it was by his act that we were
injured, and we only refrain from complaining of him, because he did not
know what he was doing. The same reason makes it possible for men to do
us good without conferring benefits upon us, or to harm us without doing
us wrong, because it is intention which distinguishes our friends
from our enemies. How many have been saved from service in the army by
sickness! Some men have been saved from sharing the fall of their house,
by being brought up upon their recognizances to a court of law by their
enemies; some have been saved by ship-wreck from falling into the hands
of pirates; yet we do not feel grateful to such things, because chance
has no feeling of the service it renders, nor are we grateful to our
enemy, though his lawsuit, while it harassed and detained us, still
saved our lives. Nothing can be a benefit which does not