It was the artists and intellectuals of the INTERNATIONAL SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT that formed around 1870 that provided a way to recast the most persistant of problems in the history of philosophy: the mind-body Problem. They held a third position in relation to conciousness: Panpsychism (everything is possessed of mind). They did not oppose the idea of science per se but wished only to substitute The Monad of the Medieval Alchemists, Giordano Bruno (1548 - 1600) and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) for the Atom of the Atomic Theory of John Dalton (1766-1844). The Monad of The Symbolists as opposed to the Atom could be studied by all from the scientist to the psychic.
What The Symbolists of the 1890's did not ask for was an "open forum" about the subject of Mind-Physics at their time - they knew they could not recieve a hearing. (It is only in our own "fin de siecle" the Age Of Forums that such an enterprise could be fostered.) Instead they ignored the assumptions of the prevailing scientific world-view and went right after those anti-scientific tendencies that prevail in the popular culture of any period of history and use them to develop a new artistic agenda.
The list would include: occultism, utopianism, mysticism, mythology, higher dimensionality, spiritualism, etc., in other words those subjects and study of them that most scholars would consider tedious, repellent, and undignified. The Symbolists added tot he list the sense of the exotic of both time and space. As Examples:
In essence The Symbolists pushed the genteel eclecticism, so typical fo 19th Century western aesthetics, to a devouring extreme. For instance when Sir John Woodroffe (pen-named Arthur Avalon), who was an English Justice of the High Court of India at Calcutta, first introduced texts and images of The Cult of Tantra to Victorian Europe of the last decade of the 19th Century, it was for the purpose of demeaning the people of India - a people who were in the process of revolting against British rule. The vision of Cosmic Sexuality with its mythic rituals, religious art and implied lifestyles of the Cult of Tantra was, as Sir Woodroffe had surmised, just enough to rouse the righteous prudery of the Europe of his time.
But it was The Symbolists who picked up right away on the diagrammatic and fragmented formats of the hallucinatory color schemes of Tantric Art. It has been recently noted, since about 1985, that the work of The Symbolists (there have been references as early as 1914) was the major influence for the development of "abstract art", the art-form which has dominated the aethetics of the 20th Century. But at the same time art historians have claimed that the International Symbolist Movement ended in 1910. A strange thing to say when so many artists like Piet Mondrian (1872-1944), Kazimir Malevich (1878-1935) and Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) were following the Symbolist agenda and expanding on it. But that is another subject entirely.