"It is a painful thing to be under obligations to people against one's will. Nothing sweeter, on the contrary, than to receive a kindness from a person one loves.... I must then choose the person of whom I consent to receive anything, and I should even be more particular in regard to kindness-creditors than to money-creditors; to the latter one need only return what he has received from them; this reimbursement done we have acquitted ourselves toward them; in the matter of kindnesses, on the contrary, one should pay more than what he has received." 2. A second rule is that from the moment one accepts a kindness, he must accept it cheerfully. "When we have concluded to accept a kindness, let us do it cheerfully.... To accept a kindness with pleasure, is making the first payment of the interest (II., xxii.).--There are people who only consent to receive in secret; they wish neither witnesses to, nor confidants of, the obligations they are contracting. If the benefactor is bound to proclaim his kindness only inasmuch as its publicity will give pleasure to the person he obliges, the one receiving should, on the contrary, call together the crowd. One is at liberty not to accept what he blushes to receive (xxxiii.).... One of the lesser paradoxes of the stoics is, that in receiving a kindness cheerfully, one has already acquitted himself." 3. One must awaken the remembrance of a good deed: _to remember is already to acquit one's self_ (xxiv.). "Which, according to you, is the most culpable, he who feels no gratitude for a kindness, or he who does not even keep it in mind?... It would seem that one thought very little about restitution when he has got so far as to forget the kindness.... To acquit one's self of a kindness, one needs means, some fortune; but the recollection of it is a gratitude which costs nothing. To withhold a payment which requires neither trouble nor riches, is inexcusable.... The objects memory is busy with never escape it; it only loses those it does not often revert to." =69. Kant's rules touching benevolence and gratitude.=--To the maxims of the ancients which we have just summed up, let us add a few principles borrowed of a modern moralist, the philosopher Kant: