subtilize

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

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

Wordsworth's pantheism is a subtilized animism, but there are moments when his feeling is like that of the child or savage when he is convinced that the flower enjoys the air it breathes.

From Far Away and Long Ago by W. H. (William Henry) Hudson

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

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 Aristotle did not consider the "pneuma," which thus reached the interior of the blood-vessels, to be exactly the same thing as air—it was "a subtilized and condensed air."

From Fathers of Biology by Charles McRae

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

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

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

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