subtilize

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 Hawthorne, Nathaniel

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 Johnson, Samuel

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 Doane, T. W.

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 Cook, Martha Elizabeth Duncan Walker

Calvert says: "Ladyhood is an emanation from the heart subtilized by culture;" giving as two requisites for the highest breeding, transmitted qualities and the culture of good training.

From Our Deportment Or the Manners, Conduct and Dress of the Most Refined Society by Young, John H.

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 Jones, Edmund David

"And if I don't pay you the doubtful compliment of saying that you have the Balliol manner, you have at least a kind of subtilized reminiscence of it."

From My Friend Prospero by Harland, Henry

The spiritual comprehension may be infinitely subtilized, but the raw material it operates upon must remain.

From Browning and His Century by Clarke, Helen Archibald

Every page bears the impress of thought, but it is thought subtilized, and redolent of poetry.

From The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 04, No. 22, August, 1859 by Various

These were concessions to a ruling mode,—concessions the more readily made, owing to their being in complete harmony with the strong subtilizing and allegorizing tendencies of Dante's own mind.

From The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 03, No. 15, January, 1859 by Various

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 Sinclair, May

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

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

The risk in subtilizing stage character lies just here.

From How to See a Play by Burton, Richard Francis, Sir

Theosophy—and a large share of what is called theology—is simply a refining and subtilizing of mythology.

From The Next Step in Religion An Essay toward the Coming Renaissance by Sellars, Roy Wood