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

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

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

Still, all inward life works itself out in a few simple forms, and culture cannot go very far before the religious graces reappear in it in a subtilized intellectual shape.

From English Critical Essays Nineteenth Century by Edmund David Jones

“Half subtilized to chyle, the liquid food Readiest obeys th’ assimilating powers.”

From The Cook's Oracle; and Housekeeper's Manual by William Kitchiner

Its vividness, its fullness, the sharp bite of its reality go; but a subtilized essence remains.

From The Principles of Aesthetics by Dewitt H. Parker

In analyzing the idea of disorder thus subtilized, we shall see that it represents nothing at all, and at the same time the problems that have been raised around it will vanish.

From Creative Evolution by Arthur Mitchell

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

But Mr. Arabin went on subtilizing, regarding neither the archdeacon's raillery nor Eleanor's defence.

From Barchester Towers by Anthony Trollope

Nay; in genuine biographies I had read of the subtilizing or exalting influence of some diseases on the mental powers. 

From The Lifted Veil by George Eliot

In them there is no subtilizing of human affections, of human fears, or of human faith.

From The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 69, July, 1863 by Various

"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

By subtilizing, the modern theologian becomes as little intelligible to himself as to others.

From Superstition In All Ages (1732) Common Sense by Anna Knoop