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In general Johnson did not participate much in the linguistic controversies of his time, though it was inevitable that he should express his preferences, if not in extended analyses, then in commentary and dialogue. Perhaps for this reason his clearly stated views on the vexed question of the origin of language have never been taken very seriously. Johnson's commitment to the idea of the divine ‘origin’ of language, in an age which saw it, primarily, as having developed according to the course of nature, has a bearing on his view of poetry. It is consonant with his idea of the highest uses of language in poetry, where it enables man to tread on the threshold of religon, or to glimpse his divine ‘end’.
Johnson's fairly elaborate comment on the origin of language is recorded for us by Boswell under the year 1783. It post-dates the extended investigations of eighteenth-century philosophers of the subject and represents his mature thought. Not only was Johnson aware of all aspects of the prevailing controversy, but he took them into account in his comment, however casual a demeanour he might have struck while talking to Boswell. Indeed, he seems to have kept up with the subject, and spoke with assurance, in the knowledge that the philosophers of the century were hardly able to bring to bear on the question the conviction of their philosophical writings. Locke, though amongst the first to demarcate the concerns of the eighteenth-century empiricists, later defined by Condillac as ‘to study … the human understanding; not to discover its nature, but to know its operations’,1 could not altogether avoid the debate. Unable to account for the origin of language from ‘sensation’ and ‘reflection’, which he had declared were the source of all human knowledge, he said in terminology alien to the spirit of his Essay: