Meanings of subtilize in English

How do these systematizers refine and subtilize?

Thereupon Mr. Arabin commenced to subtilize.

By long brooding over our recollections, we subtilize them into something akin to imaginary stuff, and hardly capable of being distinguished from it.

We are not now in search of the vanishing point where Matter subtilizes.

But Mr. Arabin went on subtilizing, regarding neither the archdeacon's raillery nor Eleanor's defence.

Its vividness, its fullness, the sharp bite of its reality go; but a subtilized essence remains.

Every page bears the impress of thought, but it is thought subtilized, and redolent of poetry.

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

Gold was the soil converted into money, the soil mobilized, exchangeable, transportable, divisible, subtilized, spiritualized, as it were.

Brimming with the subtilized misery that he was capable of feeling, he followed the opposite way towards the inn.

If the air of Provence, which subtilizes things still more, magnifies for you our visions, you will be in the clouds.

Some of the B words had highly subtilized meanings, barely intelligible to anyone who had not mastered the language as a whole.