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

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

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

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

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

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

Except that the houses had receded and faded, and the passers-by were subtilized into unnoticeable ghosts!

From The Old Wives' Tale by Arnold Bennett

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

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 Edmund David Jones

In them there is no subtilizing of human affections, of human fears, or of human faith.

From The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 69, July, 1863 by Various

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

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

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

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

Nay; in genuine biographies I had read of the subtilizing or exalting influence of some diseases on the mental powers. 

From The Lifted Veil by George Eliot