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

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 Flitch, J. E. Crawford (John Ernest Crawford)

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

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.

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

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

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

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 Holbach, Paul Henri Thiry, baron d'

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

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

The risk in subtilizing stage character lies just here.

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

"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 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor