 To understand Eckhart, he has to be properly placed within the western philosophical tradition of which he was a part.Josiah Royce, an objective idealist, saw Eckhart as a representative example of 13th and 14th century Catholic mystics "on the verge of pronounced heresy" but without original philosophical opinions.Royce attributes Eckhart's reputation for originality to the fact that he translated scholastic philosophy from Latin into German, and that Eckhart wrote about his speculations in German instead of Latin.