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 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

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

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

From Browning and His Century by Helen Archibald Clarke

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

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

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

He is neither subtilized into an idea by pure thinking nor civilized into a gentleman by social laws and prejudices.

From Tragic Sense Of Life by J. E. Crawford (John Ernest Crawford) Flitch

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

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

How! cries the metaphysician, the subtilizing philosopher, what! refuse to the Divinity, those qualities we discover in his creatures?

From The System of Nature, Volume 2 by Paul Henri Thiry, baron d'Holbach

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

From Barchester Towers by Anthony Trollope

The risk in subtilizing stage character lies just here.

From How to See a Play by Sir Richard Francis Burton