Man’s destiny on earth, as I am led to conceive it, consists in the realization of a perfect society, fellowship, or brotherhood among men, proceeding upon a complete Divine subjugation in the bosom of the race, first of self-love to brotherly love, and then of both loves to universal love or the love of God, as will amount to a regenerate nature in man, by converting first his merely natural consciousness, which is one of comparative isolation and impotence, into a social consciousness, which is one of comparative omnipresence and omnipotence; and then and thereby exalting his moral freedom, which is a purely negative one, into an aesthetic or positive form: so making spontaneity and not will, delight and no longer obligation, the spring of his activity.
Henry James the elder (1863, 6)
James was the father of Henry James the novelist and William James the philosopher and psychologist. Later (p. 10) in his book Substance and Shadow, he refers to the ‘perfect society, fellowship, or brotherhood among men’ as ‘the Social principle’ – which Peirce identified as the foundation of logic. Peirce also expanded on this theme in ‘Evolutionary Love’ (1893):
… We are to understand, then, that as darkness is merely the defect of light, so hatred and evil are mere imperfect stages of ἀγάπη and ἀγαθόν, love and loveliness. This concords with that utterance reported in John’s Gospel: “God sent not the Son into the world to judge the world; but that the world should through him be saved. He that believeth on him is not judged: he that believeth not hath been judged already.… And this is the judgment, that the light is come into the world, and that men loved darkness rather than the light.” That is to say, God visits no punishment on them; they punish themselves, by their natural affinity for the defective. Thus, the love that God is, is not a love of which hatred is the contrary; otherwise Satan would be a coordinate power; but it is a love which embraces hatred as an imperfect stage of it, an Anteros—yea, even needs hatred and hatefulness as its object. For self-love is no love; so if God’s self is love, that which he loves must be defect of love; just as a luminary can light up only that which otherwise would be dark. Henry James, the Swedenborgian, says: “It is no doubt very tolerable finite or creaturely love to love one’s own in another, to love another for his conformity to oneself: but nothing can be in more flagrant contrast with the creative Love, all whose tenderness ex vi termini must be reserved only for what intrinsically is most bitterly hostile and negative to itself.” This is from Substance and Shadow: an Essay on the Physics of Creation.
— EP1:353-4, W8:184-5
What James calls ‘morality’ seems equivalent to Peirce’s ‘self-control,’ which enables taking responsibility for one’s actions. That this ‘moral freedom’ should ideally be ‘exalted’ into the form of ‘spontaneity’ and ‘delight’ sounds more like Blake than Peirce, but is reflected in Peirce’s classification of the ‘normative sciences,’ where ethics depends on esthetics, just as logic depends on the Social Principle.