It was left to maverick scientists of the fin-de-siecle, like William James (1842-1910) who studied the Boston medium Mrs. Leonora E. Piper, Sir William Crookes (1832-1919) who studied the Edinburgh medium and levitationist Daniel Douglas Home (1833-1893) to begin the Symbolists' quest for Mind Physics. >From their efforts The Society for Psychical Research was founded in London in 1882, and later The American Society for Psychical Research was founded in New York City in 1885. During the 20th Century, Mind-Physics remained less than a concern for mainstream science. There were, of course, hypotheses put forward and various attempts to place Mind-Physics within the accepted model of science, such as the work of Dr. J.B. Rhine, director of the Foundation for Research on The Nature of Man at Duke University in the 1930's and 40's, or Charles Honorton of The Miamonides Group in Brooklyn New York in the 1960's.
But as Curt J Ducasse (1881-1969), chairman of the Department of Philosophy at Brown University, long an advocate of Mind-Physics, said in the 1950's that the nature of the psychical demands a creative change in the nature of how science is conducted in order to effectively reveal the phenomenon for study. The traditional model of science (from 18th and 19th Centuries) is based on degrees of quantity and the open, repeatable experiment has often been considered too restrictive and reductive in nature to deal with the subject matter and entities that often transcend the physical senses.
The non-repeatable experiment was put forth as an idea by the Symbolist, Jean Delville (1867-1953), painter and alchemist from Belgium in 1895 as the "experiment of the imagination". Later, Albert Einstein (1879-1955) would call this concept "das gedankenexperimenten" (the thought-experiment) which he applied to the science of cosmology.