subtilize

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And when the soul has subtilized itself, until it can penetrate them, it arrives at the word, that is, at perfect will; and then its motion ceases, and its joy remains.

From Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 3 by Hamilton Wright Mabie

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

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

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

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

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

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