[f. prec.; or f. ppl. stem of L. fīnīre.] trans. To make finite; to subject to limitations.
1628. T. Spencer, Logick, 47. The matter doth finite, and contract the amplitude of the forme.
1847. Bushnell, Chr. Nurt., II. v. (1861), 318. They had parents given them in the Lord—the Lord to be in them, there to personate and finite himself, and gather to such human motherhood and fatherhood, a piety transferable to Himself, as the knowledge of his nobler, unseen Fatherhood arrives.
1867. Eng. Leader, 20 April, 224. There are two sides—a divine side and a human side … the latter being finited, attempered, and dimmed.
Hence Finited ppl. a.
1846. Clissold, trans. Swedenborg’s Principia, I. iii. 81. In relation to things much finited and compounded, this finite is as it were nothing; that nevertheless it is a something and a finited ens.
1868. H. A. Page, The Old Morality and the New, in Contemporary Review, VIII. 617. The mystical idea, in some form or other, is a falling back from the moral face of things to find God finited in Nature; and identity with Him is held to be attainable by thinking away those very elements of diversity by which again spirit in its last individual forms infinites and unifies the manifold.
1884. Gosp. Divine Humanity, iii. 60. Man in his finited state is dust of the ground.
[Finiteness: a spurious word in the Dictionaries.
Cited by Johnson from Sir T. Browne (Pseud. Ep., I. ii., where the real reading is ‘fruitlesse’).]
