excogitating

Scripture, they would adopt quite a different plan of life: their minds would not be agitated by so many contentions, nor so many hatreds, and they would cease to be excited by such a blind and rash passion for interpreting the sacred writings, and excogitating novelties in religion.

Theologico-Political Treatise 2007

Magdalen College, musing on the “Blessedness of the Righteous,” and now in the recesses of its libraries, “unsphering the spirit of Plato,” and amassing that learning and excogitating that divine philosophy which were soon to be transfigured and immortalized in his “Living Temple.”

Life of Dr Owen 1965

He seems incapable of excogitating a single plot of treachery, or of carrying into execution a single deed of violence.

Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 Various

The method of natural science consists in establishing general principles on the basis of the materials actually furnished by experiments and observation and not in excogitating general laws and then consoling oneself with the thought that while our knowledge of nature is as yet extremely imperfect, time will furnish the actual material necessary to substantiate our guesses.

At the Deathbed of Darwinism A Series of Papers Eberhard Dennert

When we consider the one attentively, we see the other bursting from its bosom, or better, the one and the other reveal themselves as one and the same, and we escape from the desperate trilemma, of either denying the lyrical and personal character of art, or of asserting that it is adjunctive, external and accidental, or of excogitating a new doctrine of Aesthetic, which we do not know where to find.

Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic Benedetto Croce 1909

Neither you nor any one else may ever take such a single-minded and unchecked course in the world as the one you are excogitating.

The Life of Reason George Santayana 1907

Mythology, in excogitating hidden dramatic causes for natural phenomena, or in attributing events to the human values which they might prevent or secure, has profoundly perverted and confused the intellect; it has delayed and embarrassed the discovery of natural forces, at the same time fostering presumptions which, on being exploded, tended to plunge men, by revulsion, into an artificial despair.

The Life of Reason George Santayana 1907

In fact, as I reached Delamere Terrace, panting and excogitating the likeliest excuse to offer Mrs. Stimcoe, the door of No. 7 opened, and the lady herself emerged upon the night, with a shawl swathed carelessly over her masculine neck and shoulders.

Poison Island Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch 1903

Instead of excogitating new constitutions or planning vengeance against hereditary foes the Venetian attended to his commerce on the sea, swayed distant provinces, watched the interests of the state in foreign cities, and fought the naval battles of the republic.

Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) The Age of the Despots John Addington Symonds 1866

“Night Thoughts,” and where his characters are only transparent shadows through which we see the bewigged _embonpoint_ of the didactic poet, excogitating epigrams or ecstatic soliloquies by the light of a candle fixed in a skull.

The Essays of "George Eliot" Complete George Eliot 1849