Dr. Samuel Johnson's erudition was admirably shown in the original dictionary he compiled, as was his talent for expressing common sense in pithy statements. But his metaphysical naïveté was equally shown when he stamped a foot on the ground in refutation of Berkeley's discovery. The foot's touch gave Johnson a physical sensation. He stopped there, not grasping that the sensation had given him an idea--solidity--and that without this idea his foot would not have felt the ground. He took it for granted that his experience testified to material reality. Science knows now that it was testimony to his sensations only, and the rest was theory and assumption: Berkeley took it as testimony to Idea-lism. But that is only a halfway house to adequate explanation, to Mentalism.
-- Notebooks Category 21: Mentalism > Chapter 4 : The Challenge of Mentalism > # 244
