dissolvent

The subjects are chosen almost at random, and are very frequently nothing but pegs on which to hang notes and digressions in which the author indulges his critical and dissolvent faculty.

From A Short History of French Literature by George Saintsbury

As in the case of Hume's metaphysical studies, they constitute the most powerful dissolvent the century was to see.

From Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham by Harold Joseph Laski

That science was Geology; a science destined, in its ultimate scope, to prove a far more powerful dissolvent of dogma than any of its compeers.

From Pioneers of Evolution from Thales to Huxley With an Intermediate Chapter on the Causes of Arrest of the Movement by Edward Clodd

The dream was agonizing as he tried one dissolvent after another without success.

From Philo Gubb, Correspondence-School Detective by Rea Irvin

And how did Goethe, that grand dissolvent in his age when there were fewer of them than at present, proceed in his task of dissolution, of liberation of the modern European from the old routine?

From Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold by William Savage Johnson