It was used to apply to those who, after Plato, believed in the independent reality of ideas, universals, or general natures.
"The Approach to Philosophy"
Ralph Barton Perry
You can't argue from particulars to universals.
"The Necromancers"
Robert Hugh Benson
Modern philosophers have not been sparing in their contempt for the scholastic dogma that genera and species are a peculiar kind of substances, which general substances being the only permanent things, while the individual substances comprehended under them are in a perpetual flux, knowledge, which necessarily imports stability, can only have relation to those general substances or universals, and not to the facts or particulars included under them.
"A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive (Vol. 1 of 2)"
John Stuart Mill