Yet again, as was pointed out in the last chapter, the sympathy which prompts efforts for others' welfare must be pained by self-injury on the part of others; and must, therefore, cause aversion to accept benefits derived from their self-injuries. What is to be inferred? While each, when occasion offers, is ready, anxious even, to surrender egoistic satisfactions; others, similarly natured, cannot but resist the surrender. If any one, proposing to treat himself more hardly than a disinterested spectator would direct, refrains from appropriating that which is due; others, caring for him if he will not care for himself, must necessarily insist that he shall appropriate it. General altruism then, in its developed form, must inevitably resist individual excesses of altruism. The relation at present familiar to us will be inverted, and instead of each maintaining his own claims, others will maintain his claims for him: not, indeed, by active efforts, which will be needless, but by passively resisting any undue yielding up of them. There is nothing in such behavior which is not even now to be traced in our daily experiences as beginning. In business transactions among honorable men there is usually a desire on either side that the other shall treat himself fairly. Not unfrequently there is a refusal to take something regarded as the other's due, but which the other offers to give up. In social intercourse, too, the cases are common in which those who would surrender their shares of pleasure are not permitted by the rest to do so. Further development of sympathy cannot but make this mode of behaving increasingly general and increasingly genuine. Certain complex restraints on excesses of altruism exist, which, in another way, force back the individual upon a normal egoism. Two may here be noted. In the first place, self-abnegations often repeated imply on the part of the actor a tacit ascription of relative selfishness to others who profit by the self-abnegations. Even with men as they are there occasionally arises a feeling among those for whom sacrifices are frequently made, that they are being insulted by the assumption that they are ready to receive them, and in the mind of the actor also, there sometimes grows up a recognition of this feeling on their part, and a consequent check on his too great or too frequent surrenders of pleasure. Obviously, in more developed natures, this kind of check must act still more promptly.