What is "subtile"

Usage examples of "subtile".

Great Work, we must skillfully separate the subtile from the gross, the mystic from the positive, allegory from theory.

It is no disgrace, no more than for your adventurous reveller to fall by some inauspicious chance in his galliard, or for some subtile politic to undertake the bastinado, that the state might think worthily of him, and respect him as a man well beaten to the world.

All persons calling themselves Schollers going about begging, all Seafaring men pretending losses of their Shippes or goods on the sea going about the Country begging, all idle persons going about in any Country either begging or using any subtile crafte or unlawful Games .

Even if that subtile form of force which we call nervous energy should prove to be uncorrelated with other forms of energy, the idea of the conservation of energy must be changed.

What can you make of those circumstantial statements we have seen in the papers, of children forming mysterious friendships with ophidians of different species, sharing their food with them, and seeming to be under some subtile influence exercised by those creatures?

With laborious research it piles up complications to make liberty out of necessity, to compose for itself a matter so subtile, and so mobile, that liberty, by a veritable physical paradox, and thanks to an effort which cannot last long, succeeds in maintaining its equilibrium on this very mobility.

Those Barbarians despised in then turn the restless and subtile levity of the Orientals, the authors of every heresy.

Him therefore now the obiect of his spightAnd deadly food he makes: him to offendBy forged treason, or by open fightHe seekes, of all his drift the aymed end:Thereto his subtile engins he does bendHis practick wit, and his faire filed tong,With thousand other sleights: for well he kend,His credit now in doubtfull ballaunce hong.

So when he saw his flatt'ring arts to fayle,And subtile engines bet from batteree,With greedy force he gan the fort assayle,Whereof he weend possessed soone to bee,And win rich spoile of ransackt chastetee.

So great a mistresse of her art she was,And perfectly practiz'd in womans craft,That though therein himselfe he thought to pas,And by his false allurements wylie draftHad thousand women of their loue beraft,Yet now he was surpriz'd: for that false spright,Which that same witch had in this forme engraft,Was so expert in euery subtile slight,That it could ouerreach the wisest earthly wight.

Vpon a bed of Roses she was layd,As faint through heat, or dight to pleasant sin,And was arayd, or rather disarayd,All in a vele of silke and siluer thin,That hid no whit her alablaster skin,But rather shewd more white, if more might bee:More subtile web Arachne can not spin,Nor the fine nets, which oft we wouen seeOf scorched deaw, do not in th'aire more lightly flee.

Among them we may occasionally see some man of deep conscientiousness, and subtile and refined understanding, who spends a life in sophisticating with an intellect which he cannot silence, and exhausts the resources of ingenuity in attempting to reconcile the promptings of his conscience and reason with orthodoxy, which yet he does not, perhaps, to the end succeed in doing.

Hence, engaged in the abstract and metaphysical nature of motion and its first cause, of the inherent or incidental properties of matter, its successive forms and its extension, that is to say, of time and space unbounded, the physical theologians lost themselves in a chaos of subtile reasoning and scholastic controversy.