This increase of personal benefit achieved by benefiting others is but partially achieved where a selfish motive prompts the seemingly unselfish act: it is fully achieved only where the act is really unselfish. Though services rendered with the view of some time profiting by reciprocated services, answer to a certain extent; yet, ordinarily, they answer only to the extent of bringing equivalents of reciprocated services. Those which bring more than equivalents are those not prompted by any thoughts of equivalents. For obviously it is the spontaneous outflow of good nature, not in the larger acts of life only but in all its details, which generates in those around the attachments prompting unstinted benevolence. Besides furthering prosperity, other regarding actions conduce to self-regarding gratifications by generating a genial environment. With the sympathetic being every one feels more sympathy than with others. All conduct themselves with more than usual amiability to a person who hourly discloses a lovable nature. Such a one is practically surrounded by a world of better people than one who is less attractive. If we contrast the state of a man possessing all the material means to happiness, but isolated by his absolute egoism, with the state of an altruistic man relatively poor in means but rich in friends, we may see that various gratifications, not to be purchased by money, come in abundance to the last and are inaccessible to the first. While, then, there is one kind of other regarding action, furthering the prosperity of fellow-citizens at large, which admits of being deliberately pursued from motives that are remotely self-regarding--the conviction being that personal well-being depends in large measure on the well-being of society--there is an additional kind of other regarding action having in it no element of conscious self-regard, which nevertheless conduces greatly to egoistic satisfactions. § 80. Yet other modes exist in which egoism unqualified by altruism habitually fails. It diminishes the totality of egoistic pleasure by diminishing in several directions the capacity for pleasure. Self gratifications, considered separately, or in the aggregate, lose their intensities by that too great persistence in them which results if they are made the exclusive objects of pursuit. The law that function entails waste, and that faculties yielding pleasure by their action cannot act incessantly without exhaustion and accompanying satiety, has the implication that intervals during which altruistic activities absorb the energies, are intervals during which the capacity for egoistic pleasure is recovering its full degree. The sensitiveness to purely personal enjoyments is maintained at a higher pitch by those who minister to the enjoyments of others than it is by those who devote themselves wholly to personal enjoyments.