subtilize

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

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

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

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 Verne, Jules

In the past all his experiences were refined, subtilized, transfigured.

From Hazlitt on English Literature An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature by Zeitlin, Jacob

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)

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 McRae, Charles

In analyzing the idea of disorder thus subtilized, we shall see that it represents nothing at all, and at the same time the problems that have been raised around it will vanish.

From Creative Evolution by Mitchell, Arthur

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 Holcroft, Thomas

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

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

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

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 Sinclair, May

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