Mesmerism is merely a means for Poe to unleash another of his Poe's philosophical-discourses-in-tale-form. Over a series of treatments, an unnamed narrator uses mesmerism on an asthma-sufferer named Vankirk. VanKirk goes into a trance and tells the narrator that he's passed into a half-world between life and death. The hypnotized man relates his insights into the commensurate nature of God, the universal mind, and "unparticled matter."
This is clearly Poe trying to reconcile theism with the physics-discoveries of his time. Within the story there's no proof of Vankirk's exegesis, except for one odd aftermath. Vankirk dies, and the narrator observes that in less than a minute the man's body "had all the rigidity of stone." I would term this trope "freakish flesh" in that the reader cannot be sure that it's anything but a physiological effect brought on by the sufferer's unique mental condition.
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