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1 " Lenin clearly and unambiguously poses the question of the relationshipbetween the ‘form’ of materialism and its ‘essence’, of the impermissibility ofidentification of the former with the latter. The ‘form’ of materialism is foundin those concrete-scientific ideas about the constitution of matter (about the‘physical’, about ‘atoms and electrons’) and in natural scientific generalizationsof these ideas that are inevitably turn out to be historically limited, changing,subject to reconsideration by the natural science itself. The ‘essence’ of materialism is found in the acceptance of the objective reality that exists independently of human cognition and that is only reflected in it. The creative development of dialectical materialism on the basis of the ‘philosophical conclusions derived from the newest discoveries of natural science’ is, according to Lenin, found not in the reconsideration of this essence and not in making the ideasof natural scientists eternal, but in the deepening of the understanding of the‘relationship between cognition and the physical world’ that is connected withthese new ideas about nature. The dialectical understanding of the relationshipbetween the ‘form’ and ‘essence’ of materialism, and therefore, the relationship between ‘ontology’ and ‘epistemology’ constitutes the ‘spirit of dialecticalmaterialism "
― Evald Ilyenkov , Intelligent Materialism: Essays on Hegel and Dialectics
