The role it plays is too important for that.

If we obliterate it, the real world of material things which seems to be revealed in our experience melts into a chaos of fantastic experiences whose appearances and disappearances seem to be subject to no law.
And it is worthy of remark that it is not merely in common life that the distinction is drawn.

Every man of science must give heed to it.
The psychologist does, it is true, pay much attention to sensations; but even he distinguishes between the sensations which he is studying and the material things to which he relates them, such as brains and sense-organs.

And those who cultivate the physical sciences strive, when they give an account of things and their behavior, to lay before us a history of changes analogous to the burning of the stick and of the house, excluding mere changes in sensations.
There is no physicist or botanist or zooelogist who has not our common experience that things as perceived by us--our experiences of things--appear or disappear or change their character when we open or shut our eyes or move about.

But nothing of all this appears in their books.