On the other hand, he identified the active intellect (nous poietikos), through whose agency the potential intellect in man becomes actual, not with anything from within people, but with the divine creator itself. In the early Renaissance his doctrine of the soul's mortality was adopted by Pietro Pomponazzi against the Thomists and the Averroists. For him, the only possible human immortality is an immortality of a detached human thought, more specifically when the nous has as the object of its thought the active intellect itself, or another incorporeal intelligible form.[35]