Heinlein’s story Waldo is endlessly fascinating but also endlessly frustrating, because it is so self-contradictory. It starts off as a sharply delineated roadmap of the shift from reason to chaos — but then abruptly turns on its heels and attempts to stuff chaos back into the box of scientific materialism. And there’s no obvious reason why.
The story presents us with two very different representatives of higher knowledge. One is the ancient hex doctor, Gramps Schneider, who still holds by the assumptions of the reason vision and apparently regards the Other World as a literal spirit realm. The other is the mad Dr. Rambeau, who embraces chaos and sees the universe as a place of total uncertainty where anything can happen.
Waldo, in contrast, has absolutely no awareness of higher knowledge and believes only in scientific materialism.. He dismisses Rambeau as unhinged but is willing to give credence to Schneider’s statements — at least to the extent that he can redefine them in his own materialistic terms.
He therefore starts by assuming that “everything Schneider had to say was coldly factual and enlightened, rather than allegorical and superstitious.” This leads him to the conclusion that Schneider must be describing an alternate universe, “a literal, physical ‘Other World’ … even though he had not used conventional scientific phraseology.” And on that basis, Waldo develops a theory in which both occultism and Fortean anomalies can be plausibly explained “from the standpoint of a coextensive additional continuum.”
A similar argument can be found in many SF stories of the period where superstitious native beliefs are shown to have a rational scientific foundation. In this case, however, Heinlein leaves the reader with a not-so-subtle implication that Gramps Schneider is the person of genuine knowledge and Waldo the hapless native trapped in an overly-limited frame of reference.