F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote famously: "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability of function."

With the beginnings of biological taxonomy in the late 17th century, Western biological thinking was influenced by two opposed ideas.

F. Scott Fitzgerald says somewhere that a good novelist is one capable of holding two opposed ideas in his head at the same time.

But it was also during the past year that another Fitzgerald maxim was triumphantly reaffirmed: "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function."

Skepticism, the weighing of options, "the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind simultaneously," in the words of F. Scott Fitzgerald, are the tools of the trade.

Note-Books E, in Edmund Wilson Crack-Up (1945) The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.

This sounds like the ability "to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function" that F. Scott Fitzgerald defined as first-rate intelligence in "The Crack-Up."

To quote F. Scott, 'The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time.'

It lay in her ability to reconcile opposed ideas and make the result seem the soul of fidelity.

Occasionally during the Clinton presidency, writers dredged up Scott Fitzgerald's definition of a first-rate intelligence: that of someone who could hold two opposed ideas in his head at the same time and still function.