subtilize
Americanverb (used with object)
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to elevate in character; sublimate.
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to make (the mind, senses, etc.) keen or discerning; sharpen.
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to introduce subtleties into or argue subtly about.
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to make thin, rare, or more fluid or volatile; refine.
verb (used without object)
verb
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(tr) to bring to a purer state; refine
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to debate subtly
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(tr) to make (the mind, etc) keener
Other Word Forms
Etymology
Origin of subtilize
1585–95; < Medieval Latin subtīlizāre, equivalent to subtīl ( is ) subtle + -izāre -ize
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
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
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.
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
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
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
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 Arthur Mitchell
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
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
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
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
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
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
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