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

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

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

My body was subtilized, or rather became volatile, and commingled in a state of atomic vapor, with the prodigious clouds, which rushed forward like a mighty comet into infinite space!

From A Journey to the Centre of the Earth by Jules Verne

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

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

"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 Henry Harland

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

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

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 Roy Wood Sellars

"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

The risk in subtilizing stage character lies just here.

From How to See a Play by Sir Richard Francis Burton

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