subtilize

Almost suffocating under the oppression of repressed feelings, using art only to repeat and rehearse for himself his own internal tragedy, after having wearied emotion, he began to subtilize it.

From Life of Chopin by Martha Elizabeth Duncan Walker Cook

However abstractly they speculate and subtilize, there is always an undigested bone of man-god, god-man, and vicarious atonement in the theological stomach.

From Bible Myths and their Parallels in other Religions Being a Comparison of the Old and New Testament Myths and Miracles with those of the Heathen Nations of Antiquity Considering also their Origin and Meaning by T. W. Doane

To play with important truths, to disturb the repose of established tenets, to subtilize objections, and elude proof, is too often the sport of youthful vanity, of which maturer experience commonly repents.

From The Works of Samuel Johnson, Volume 06 Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons by Samuel Johnson

By long brooding over our recollections, we subtilize them into something akin to imaginary stuff, and hardly capable of being distinguished from it.

From The Blithedale Romance by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Wordsworth's pantheism is a subtilized animism, but there are moments when his feeling is like that of the child or savage when he is convinced that the flower enjoys the air it breathes.

From Far Away and Long Ago by W. H. (William Henry) Hudson

In the past all his experiences were refined, subtilized, transfigured.

From Hazlitt on English Literature An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature by Jacob Zeitlin

Except that the houses had receded and faded, and the passers-by were subtilized into unnoticeable ghosts!

From The Old Wives' Tale by Arnold Bennett

Gold was the soil converted into money, the soil mobilized, exchangeable, transportable, divisible, subtilized, spiritualized, as it were.

From The Companions of Jehu by Alexandre Dumas père

The sight of the well-ordered writing-table subtilized for a moment his sense of her desertion.

From The Return of the Prodigal by May Sinclair

By subtilizing every thing, the modern theologian becomes as unintelligible to himself as to others.

From Good Sense by Paul Henri Thiry, baron d'Holbach

The scene is transfigured before their eyes: it is as if the heavens had opened, and inundated all its features with a celestial subtilizing aura.

From Essays Æsthetical by George H. (George Henry) Calvert

And because that reality must weigh more heavily on him than her, she was trying to defend him too, against himself, to force on him, against himself, her own subtilizing, justifying view.

From The Divine Fire by May Sinclair

"Seest thou not," adds Philo, in the same spirit of subtilizing being into power, and dividing the Logos into two.

From Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Beside it relieved me from a multitude of labours and cares, for, as I proceeded, Thomas Aquinas and his subtilizing competitors were thrown by in contempt.

From The Adventures of Hugh Trevor by Thomas Holcroft